International Journal
on Multicultural Societies
(IJMS)
Vol. 6, No. 2, 2004
“Managing Migration and
Diversity in the Asia Pacific
Region and Europe”
International Journal on Multicultural Societies (IJMS)
Vol. 6, No. 2, 2004
Managing Migration and Diversity in the Asia Pacific
Region and Europe
DIRECTOR OF PUBLICATION: Paul de Guchteneire
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: Matthias Koenig
GUEST EDITORS: Christing Inglis (Sydney University, Australia) and Matthias Koenig
(Bamberg University, Germany)
CHRISTINE INGLIS AND MATTHIAS KOENIG, Editorial
196
AMARJIT KAUR, “Crossing Frontiers: Race, Migration and Borders in Southeast Asia”
202
HIDEKI TARUMOTO, “Is State Sovereignty Declining? An Exploration of Asylum Policy
in Japan”
224
ELIZABETH GRIECO, “Will Migrant Remittances Continue Through Time? A New Answer
to an Old Question”
243
JEAN-PIERRE CASSARINO, “Theorising Return Migration: the Conceptual Approach to Return
Migrants Revisited”
253
DIRK JACOBS, “Alive and Kicking? Multiculturalism in Flanders”
280
HANS SIEBERS, “The Management of Multiculturalism: Coming to Terms with the
Multiplication of Experienced Difference”
300
Editorial
CHRISTINE INGLIS & MATTHIAS KOENIG
University of Sydney & University of Bamberg
T
he present thematic issue of UNESCO’s International Journal on
Multicultural Societies (IJMS) takes up the debate on migration and
multiculturalism. Whereas previous issues (Vol. 5, No 1 & 2) have highlighted the
differences in patterns of cultural diversity in industrialised and post-colonial
countries, the present selection of papers focuses on contemporary challenges in
managing migration and incorporation. The articles highlight problems concerning
the entry and settlement of migrants and their descendents which have direct
relevance for policy formulation. By including cases from the Asia Pacific region
and Europe in its comparative framework, the present thematic issue attempts to
broaden the transatlantic perspective that prevails in social science migration
research (see Favell 2001; Portes/DeWind 2004). A particularly important point
emerging from the analyses is, moreover, that designing policies of migration and
incorporation has to take into account international factors of population
movements (Castles/Miller 2003: 284-6); policies that implement the human rights
of migrants (Taran 2000) are thus of utmost international concern. Hence, in order
to contribute to international policies of migration and incorporation, social science
research has to go beyond the “methodological nationalism” characteristic of much
of the literature on immigration and integration (see Glick-Schiller/Wimmer 2003).
Within the Asian region there is a major focus in policy debates and analyses on
the economic dimensions and outcomes of migration. This focus reflects the
developmental status of the region where countries are striving to catch up with the
more developed, western industrialised countries. In the case of those Southeast
countries such as Malaysia which have already begun to extensively restructure
their economies, the need for additional labour to continue the process and achieve
their economic objectives is a major priority, even if it at times comes into collision
with other social and welfare objectives for the host country population. Amarjit
Kaur’s paper “Crossing Borders: Race, Migration and Borders in Southeast Asia”
illustrates the changes in migration patterns and policies in Southeast Asia since the
nineteenth century. The particular lens used for this analysis is Malaysia, the major
labour-importing country in the region.
Consistent with the economic importance of migration there has been increasing
attention given to the development of conscious policies to regulate population
flows. Kaur argues that concomitant with this growing state involvement in
Southeast Asia countries there has been the emergence of increasingly restrictive
International Journal on Multicultural Societies (IJMS), Vol. 6, No. 2, 2004: 196 - 201
ISSN 1817-4574, www.unesco.org/shs/ijms/vol6/issue2/ed © UNESCO
197
Christine Inglis & Matthias Koenig
entry regimes associated with stringent border controls and internal enforcement
measures. Among the features of labour migration in Southeast Asia, Kaur notes
the growth of a migration industry mediating between potential migrants and their
states of origin and residence. Although similar intermediaries existed during the
colonial period their role has grown as post-colonial states have increased controls
on their borders and their internal enforcement. An important effect of these
developments is that, in contrast to earlier years, temporary labour migrants find it
extremely difficult to change from the status of ‘soujourner’ to that of settler in
their new countries of residence. Kaur’s analysis gives little indication that this
situation is likely to change. This is in marked contrast to the Western European
experience of the 1960s and 1970s which saw many ‘guest workers’ settle in their
host countries. Just as initially occurred in Western Europe, this state focus on
temporary migration helps explain the limited discussion of desirable patterns and
policies to facilitate migrant incorporation in the Asia Pacific region (see also
Fenton 2003).
While temporary labour migration is the dominant form of migration in Asia,
political unrest has also meant the growth of local and international refugee
populations seeking entry and asylum. Asian nation-states have had to consider
how to respond to these flows. As the paper by Hideki Tarumoto shows, Japan –
like many other countries in the region – has been slow to address this need which
is often seen by potential countries of refuge as conflicting with their own national
economic and socio-political interests. In tracing the changes which have taken
place in Japan, including the development of a conscious asylum policy, Tarumoto
emphasises the importance of domestic politics. Although direct international
pressures, particularly from the US, were important in the 1970s in accepting small
numbers of Indochinese refugees, subsequently a climate favourable to
international human rights, including the existence of international conventions,
has not been the major factor for the limited easing of Japanese policies for asylum
seekers. In Japan, Tarumoto argues that policy making is determined by what he
refers to as ‘singular bureaucratic sovereignty’, that is the dominant role of the
Ministry of Justice. Hence, changes which have occurred reflect domestic political
developments which have caused the Ministry of Justice to modify its policies
towards asylum seeking.
Tarumoto’s analysis suggests that states are still able to maintain their policy
making powers even in the face of globalisation and increasing pressures for the
development, and implementation, of an extensive international human rights
regime highlighted by other authors (see e.g. Gurowitz 1999). It is true that the
economically oriented pragmatism often attributed to migrant receiving countries
in the Asia Pacific may be modified in the case of sending societies such as the
Philippines by a concern for the welfare of their emigrants. These countries, like
the small groups of human rights advocates in the receiving countries, may make
use of the rhetoric of human rights with appeals to international norms and
standards. However, as more normative and philosophically oriented discussions
and analysis are rare in the Asia Pacific (unlike in Europe), appeals to international
Editorial
198
human rights remain largely rhetoric. Although sending countries like the
Philippines have signed the UN Convention on the Rights of all Migrants and their
Families, major receiving countries such as Malaysia have not (see Iredale/Piper
2003).
While domestic political concerns play an important role in discussions of
international migration these are increasingly being informed by an awareness that
migration is a two-way process involving both receiving and sending countries.
This has led to a trend for states to liaise with source countries on a bilateral or,
increasingly, on a multilateral basis. One reason for the development of a multilateral approach to migration is that receiving countries are increasingly aware that
major emigration pressures in countries of origin can play a significant role in
spurring migration to unwilling reception countries. While a ‘negative’ aspect of
multi-lateral approaches may be their efforts to limit international population
movements, they also have the potential to play a more positive role in facilitating
the flow of skills and resources back to the countries of origin, thereby contributing
to their economic and social development. This has, in the long-run, the potential to
reduce emigration pressures as the factors which ‘push’ individuals to emigrate
often have an economic component.
Not all nations in the Asia Pacific region have so far been able to establish their
economic viability through internal development. Many such as the Philippines,
Indonesia and small Pacific Island states rely extensively for their economic, and
ultimately political and social survival, on the remittances of those men and women
who have gained work overseas. Elizabeth Grieco in her paper “Will Migrant
Remittances Continue Through Time? A New Answer to an Old Question”
explores what is a major issue among policy makers: how to ensure that the flow of
remittances is not prematurely halted. After outlining the critical importance of
remittances to the survival of some Pacific Island nations Grieco highlights that
their experience does not support the received wisdom that over time the flow of
remittances will decline. Instead, she argues that remittance behaviour is far more
complex and that, to understand it, it is necessary to examine the patterns of social
relationships and networks linking migrants and non-migrants. Not all migration
flows lead to high levels of remittances. A key factor leading to the diminution of
remittances is family reunification and the establishment of households overseas.
In contrast, during the process of chain migration, or coinciding with temporary
migration, the flow of remittances is greater.
Jean-Pierre Cassarino’s paper “Theorising Return Migration: the Conceptual
Approach to Return Migrants Revisited” examines another aspect of the movement
between countries of individual skills and resources: the phenomenon of return
migration. He explores the diverse conceptual approaches used to examine the
process of return migration. As he highlights, often these approaches are seeking to
answer somewhat different questions and may focus on different aspects of the
return process. Through an extensive literature review, he illustrates the variations
which characterise return migration and, in particular, the economic as well as
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Christine Inglis & Matthias Koenig
social benefits which may flow from it. Like Grieco, he also argues that it is
necessary to develop a more sociological and individually based approach to
understand the diversity of outcomes resulting from return migration. In particular,
he shares with her an emphasis on the need to examine the social networks of the
returnees and how this is related to the preparedness of migrants to return, and their
ability to mobilise resources, including the social capital inherent in their networks,
upon their return.
In contrast to the Asia Pacific region, many western European countries have
increasingly become countries of permanent settlement and recognised the need to
develop policies to address the long-term settlement of substantial immigrant
minorities. Dirk Jacobs in his paper “Alive and Kicking? Multiculturalism in
Flanders” focuses on a specific example of policy development and
implementation which he argues represents the implementation of multicultural
principles in addressing the situation of migrants, and more recently, minorities in
Flanders. In Flanders, minorities policy targets five groups: allochthonous citizens
(those with at least one parent or grandparent born outside Belgium and whose
social disadvantage is due to their ethnic origin or poor socio-economic situation);
citizens with official refugee status, non-Dutch speaking immigrants, illegal
residents and, also, ‘travelling’ groups which refers to Gypsy or Romany
populations. Significantly, the only major group ignored in this policy appears to
be the mainstream, dominant population. The Flemish policy, which Jacobs notes
is close to that of the Netherlands and many Anglo-Saxon countries, defines
‘multiculturalism’ as an overarching policy approach which is based on the
recognition of ethno-cultural groups, although not in such a way as to promote
segregation. It involves three basic components: ensuring full social participation,
or ‘emancipation’, for citizens; facilitating the integration of newcomers; and
securing the minimum health, welfare and educational needs of illegal residents.
Jacobs illustrates the significant involvement of the state in Flanders in relation to
migration incorporation which he suggests is becoming one of the new fault
lines/cleavages around which domestic politics is being organised.
Just as in the case of the Asian countries, one of Jacob’s major themes is that state
policies are rarely static. He also shows that domestic factors are extremely
important influences on policy. In Flanders, these are dependent on regional and
national developments and the will of political parties. Public opinion is also
particularly important, as in other democratic states where the electoral process
plays a key role in legitimising government policies. As Jacobs notes in his paper,
there is no certainty that those conditions, which he argues have allowed for the
development of a policy based on multiculturalism in Flanders, will continue. In
fact, recent contributions have highlighted the return of assimilation in European
integration policies (Brubaker 2001; Joppke/Morawska 2003).
The issue of policy and management moves from the immediate, political, level to
the conceptual level in the paper by Hans Siebers “The Management of
Multiculturalism: Coming to Terms with the Multiplication of Experienced
Editorial
200
Difference”. Here he explores the implications of four key philosophical
approaches to policy formulation in multicultural societies. These approaches he
labels as neoliberalism, egalitarian liberalism, communitarianism and deliberative
democracy. An important point to note in his paper is that he is conscious of the
way in which essentialist conceptualisations of ‘culture’, which carry with them a
static and reified understanding of cultural differences, have all too often been used
by those who criticise multiculturalism. Indeed he even goes so far as to suggest
that supporters of multiculturalism – or perhaps more accurately one should refer to
multicultural practices and actions – may be implicated in similar counterproductive essentialising. His concerns with the dangers of essentialism were
realised in the reactions to the shooting in October 2004 of a Dutch film producer
whose film had been openly critical of certain Islamic practices The shooting
became the focus of considerable reflection and debate in the Netherlands and
other parts of Europe where it was seen as calling into question the effectiveness,
and desirability, of policies providing for the toleration and maintenance of cultural
differences perceived to threaten the fabric of receiving or host societies.
In acknowledging the powerful negative, as well as positive, role of cultural
differences in world affairs and public opinion, Siebers’ solution to the problems
associated with essentialist definitions of ‘culture’ is to redefine multiculturalism
without reference to its cultural origins, nor its philosophical, ideological or
political dimensions. Instead, he identifies the problematic experience of personal,
and community, uncertainty, insecurity, anxiety and identity challenges as
constituting multiculturalism. He relates its emergence to trends associated with
globalisation and the fragmentation of the relatively closed communities in which
individual life and identity has hitherto been embedded. Despite differing in their
definition of multiculturalism, there is considerable similarity in the policy
objectives discussed by both Jacobs and Siebers. These include addressing major
material, as well as cultural, inequalities and disadvantage. Furthermore social
cohesion and the avoidance of conflict inform the key underlying policy objectives
examined by both authors.
While the papers published in this volume focus on the Asia Pacific region and
Europe, their wider relevance is all too evident, not least in the aftermath of the
December 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean. Against the background of the human
death toll and the devastation of the many, lesser developed countries affected,
some involved in long-running civil wars, international and national government
and civil agencies and planners are already discussing the implications for
restructuring of issues covered in our papers. These include the displacement of
people and consequent creation of environmental refugees, and the role of
remittances in the reconstruction since many of the countries affected have
substantial populations of labour emigrants. Given the destruction of local
infrastructure and employment, twin economic needs exist to find manpower to
repair the damage and, at the same time, international employment opportunities
for individuals who lost their employment and livelihoods in the disaster. Although
not addressed in the present papers, the large numbers of children orphaned by the
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Christine Inglis & Matthias Koenig
tsunami is also focussing attention on the issues associated with international
adoption. The potential for social turmoil, and even terrorism, has also been
flagged by some politicians and commentators concerned about the longer term
consequences if the restructuring process is seen as flawed or too slow in
delivering assistance. This is a particular concern where minority groups bear the
burden of delay or inadequate assistance.
The Indian Ocean tsunami is only one of a series of events, many of them
involving human volition such as the war on terrorism, which has focussed world
attention on issues related to migration and multiculturalism. Even while domestic
factors play a crucial role in the formulation and implementation of national
policies, these events have highlighted the potential of international developments
to have significant implications for the ways nation-states develop their responses
to migration and the incorporation of minority populations. It therefore seems
pertinent to further develop a substantial body of social science research going
beyond “methodological nationalism”, not only to broaden the analytical
perspectives of social science research but also to contribute to international policy
responses to migration and cultural diversity based on human rights.
References
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assimilation? Changing perspectives on
immigration and its sequels in France,
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CASTLES, S., MILLER, M. J. 2003. The Age of
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Fenton, S. 2003. “Malaysia and Capitalist
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GLICK-SCHILLER, N., WIMMER, A. 2003.
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GUROWITZ,
international norms: domestic actors,
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IREDALE, R., PIPER, N. 2003. Identification of
the Obstacles to the Signing and
Ratification of the UN Convention on the
Protection of the Rights of All Migrant
Workers: The Asia-Pacific Perspective
(Report for the International Migration and
Multicultural Policies Section). Paris:
UNESCO.
JOPPKE, C., MORAWSKA, E. 2003. Toward
Assimilation and Citizenship. Immigrants
in Liberal Nation-States. Houndsmill:
Palgrave Macmillan.
PORTES, A., DEWIND, J. 2004. “A crossAtlantic dialogue: The progress of research
and theory in the study of international
migration”. International Migration Review,
38 (3): 828-851.
TARAN, P.A. 2000. “Human Rights of
Migrants: Challenges of the New Decade”.
International Migration 38 (6):7-46.
Crossing Frontiers: Race, Migration and
Border Control in Southeast Asia
AMARJIT KAUR
School of Economics
University of New England, Armidale
Transnational labour migration has been a dominant feature of
Southeast Asian labour history since the 1870s, affecting those who
moved, and impacting on host communities. Moreover, until about the
1940s, borders were porous and migration was largely unrestricted,
consistent with colonial migration goals and the region’s
demographics. Since the 1970s, however, labour migration in the
region has become more diversified, and consists predominantly of
intra-Southeast Asian flows. Migration goals have also changed and
coincide with state polices that emphasise the nationality, race,
geographical origins, gender, skills and occupation of migrants. Free
migration has thus given way to institutionalised and restricted
migration policies that include stringent border controls and internal
enforcement measures. Crucially, a sharp increase in labour mobility
has coincided with the development of a migration industry and the
emergence of officially-sanctioned recruitment agencies and
entrepreneurs providing all sorts of services to migrant workers in
exchange for fees.
T
his paper investigates key issues relating to race, migration, and border
control regimes in Southeast Asia in the face of global economic pressures,
demographic and economic transformations, and the increasing tendency of
Southeast Asian economies to function in a complementary sense. It examines
migration patterns with respect to magnitudes, composition and characteristics of
migrants in the context of labour shortages, and concerns about national
sovereignty. It also reviews migration from the perspective of network-creating and
network-dependent relationships within the wider regional arena. The focus is on
Malaysia, which was, and continues to be, the major labour-importing country in
the region.
International Journal on Multicultural Societies (IJMS), Vol. 6, No. 2, 2004: 202 - 223
ISSN 1817-4574, www.unesco.org/shs/ijms/vol6/issue2/art1 © UNESCO
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Amarjit Kaur
1. Setting the Scene: Colonialism and Labour Migration to Southeast
Asia, 1870 – 1940
1.1. Introduction
Prior to the sixteenth century, migratory movements within the Southeast Asian
region were relatively small scale in nature and limited in geographic scope. There
was significant mercantile or religious travel involving Chinese and Indians in the
region, which predated the arrival of European commercial interests. Chinese and
Indian traders were also prominent in Southeast Asia’s leading regional entrepôts
and, although trade was small in volume, it was a source for the transmission of
ideas, new products and technologies, and migrants. In the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, as Southeast Asia’s trade continued to grow, Chinese had
begun to settle in Southeast Asia in sizeable numbers, especially in places where
there were favourable economic opportunities. For example, Chinese were active in
tin mining in Banka and Belitung during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
and in gold mining in Kalimantan in the eighteenth century.
The Indians, like the Chinese, came from a country with a long history of
manufacturing, a monetised economy, and sophisticated commerce. Gujerati and
Chulia merchants had been trading with Southeast Asia, exchanging Indian-made
textiles for Southeast Asian spices, in a trading network that linked the ports of the
Indian subcontinent with others on the eastern shore of the Bay of Bengal, in
Burma, Thailand, and the Malay states. Indian political institutions, specifically
Hindu-Buddhist traditions of kingship, were introduced into Southeast Asia by the
seventh century AD, and Indian culture was the dominant external influence in the
region in the form of Hindu-Buddhist religious-cultural systems.
1.2. Political and economic change in Southeast Asia, 1870-1914
World trade underwent major changes in both qualitative and quantitative terms
over the period 1840 to 1914. The principal driving force was industrialisation in
the West, coupled with western political and economic advances. This had two
important consequences for Southeast Asian states. First, Europe turned to the
region as a source of raw materials and as a market for its manufactured goods.
Southeast Asian states were thus integrated more fully into the world economy by
being obliged to open up their markets and resources to western enterprise.
Economic integration also resulted in flows of capital and labour into the region.
Second, the imperial drive was also driven by an agenda of competitive statebuilding overseas and, partly as a consequence, six major Southeast Asian states
emerged: as colonies, protectorates, or as part of the informal empire of European
powers.
This process, which began around 1850, climaxed between 1870 and 1914. Lower
Burma was annexed in 1852 and by the 1880s, Britain had taken over all of Burma.
Race, Migration and Borders in Southeast Asia
204
In the Malayan region, the East India Company’s Straits Settlements were taken
over by Britain, which subsequently brought the Malay States under formal
protectorate status between 1874 and 1914. Though termed ‘protectorates’ and still
nominally under their own rulers, these states were in effect governed as colonies.
France took over Indochina in a piecemeal fashion. The French government
established protectorates in Tonkin and Annam, made Cochin-china a colony and
retained the monarchies in Cambodia and Laos. Nevertheless, as in the Malay
States, colonial policy replaced local policies. The Netherlands government
consolidated its rule over the Indonesian archipelago starting from about 1824. The
Philippines, which had been under Spanish rule, was annexed by the United States
at the beginning of the twentieth century, following the Spanish-American War at
the close of the nineteenth century.
The creation of new states in Southeast Asia represented new departures within the
region. These states had precisely delineated boundaries; an internal dynamic which
possessed a ‘permanency’ that indigenous states had lacked; a new style of
administration and institutional structures to oversee the various aspects of government;
and an intensity in governance not hitherto experienced by them. But borders were kept
open, and since populations were generally sparse, colonial administrations
encouraged immigration to promote the development of their territories. Subsequently,
the region’s imperial-led integration into world commodity and capital markets
engendered an accelerated demand for their products, particularly those associated with
industrial processing and manufacturing, and this coincided with the rapid expansion of
agricultural and mineral production and the growth of the labour market.
1.3. Demography, Labour Supply and Migration
A useful starting point for understanding migration and economic change
associated with export production in Southeast Asia is to examine the region’s
demographic structure and to identify some of the most important production
niches that gave rise to labour migration. Southeast Asia had a markedly low
population growth relative to the extent of its cultivable area. Around 1870,
population was estimated at about 55 million and rose to about 69 million in 1900.
Moreover, it is estimated that the region had an average annual growth rate of
approximately 1.3 per cent between 1870 and 1930. With the exception of Java and
Tonkin, populations were sparse, and labour, rather than land, was the principal
source of value in Southeast Asian states. The population was also distributed very
unevenly and population densities were relatively low (Kaur 2004:35).
From a comparative perspective therefore, the broad division of the region into
‘labour-scarce’ and ‘labour-surplus’ countries had important implications for
migrant labour flows. There were two polar extremes to this division – Malaya and
Java. In sparsely populated Malaya, landlessness and rural deprivation among the
Malays was practically non-existent and they largely shunned wage work during
the colonial period. By comparison, Java had a huge, poor population, and nonfarm employment was crucial for survival strategies. Javanese workers shifted or
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Amarjit Kaur
moved around during the colonial period to eke out a living. Thus Java has been a
labour exporter since colonial times and Malaya/Malaysia a labour importer. Using
this framework, the other Southeast Asian countries fit somewhere in a continuum
between the two.
After 1870 the great expansion in plantation production took place in the lightly
settled areas of Malaya, Sumatra and Cochin-china. Concurrently, rice expansion
occurred in the frontier areas of Burma, Thailand and Cochin-china. The region’s
demographic structure therefore had important implications both for the location of
colonial economic activity and the destination of migrant workers. Crucially, the
concentration of migrant workers in specific sectors and countries, and their racial
origin, must thus also be viewed through this lens.
1.4. Race, Migration and Asian Contract Labour, 1870-1940
Late nineteenth-century transnational labour migration in Asia – the movement of
wage workers across frontiers and the flow of capital in the form of remittances
from the sites of work to the places of origin − laid the framework for migrant
labour diasporas in the region. The fact that this migration owed its origins to the
labour systems under which migrants travelled, also allows it to be distinguished
from other previous movements of people into the region. It involved mass
migrations, long-distance movements; organisation of travel arrangements and
employment opportunities in the receiving countries; and an empire-wide sourcing
of labour. It also involved two other groups in the migration process apart from the
migrants. These were the private labour brokers and other intermediaries who
organised travel arrangements and employment, and state officials. Moreover, in
the receiving countries, the process involved the establishment of labour depots,
and institutions such as, for example, Labour Departments and Protectorates to
manage migrant labour groups.
Asian labour migration was largely dominated by Chinese and Indians prior to
1940. The majority of migrants from both countries were impoverished and were
pushed into migration by factors such as agrarian overpopulation, natural
calamities; landlord exploitation; and in China, disruption arising from major
rebellions in the nineteenth century. Pull factors in Southeast Asia included the
growing economic opportunities in the region, the opening up of hinterlands, and
the expansion of mineral and agricultural export production. Unrestricted migration
policies; the absence of border controls; improvements in transportation technology
and falling transport costs facilitated this migration. The bulk of the migrants were
in no position to meet their travel and related costs, which were either met by
labour recruiters or future employers.
The recruitment of foreign migrant workers was consistent with a rather elastic use
of labour. The workers had many characteristics in common. They were young,
predominantly unskilled adult males who emigrated as individuals and thus had no
dependents. They also primarily comprised illiterate peasants who had spent hardly
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Race, Migration and Borders in Southeast Asia
any time away from their villages. They were involved mainly in the production of
mineral and agricultural commodities or in construction and maintenance of
transportation systems and public undertakings, and at the ports. After periods of
employment, they usually, but not always, returned to their countries of origin.
The Chinese government did not support Chinese emigration, and this opposition
made it impossible to utilise open, regulated recruitment arrangements. It was not
until 1893 that the imperial Chinese government lifted its ban on Chinese
emigration. Consequently, until the early twentieth century Chinese migration
comprised two main networks: the kinship-based migration network and the creditticket system network. The kinship-based migration network involved recruitercouriers who recruited migrants from their own villages/regions whilst the passage
money and travel expenses were commonly guaranteed by relatives or friends from
the migrants’ hometown. The credit-ticket (steerage) system, which the bulk of the
migrants relied on, involved the passage money and travel expenses being met by
labour brokers, captains of junks or labour agencies. Upon arrival at their
destinations, the migrants’ employers paid the passage money owed by the
migrants, and the migrants entered into verbal or written contracts for the
repayment of their debt in the form of labour service. When they had repaid their
debt, the workers were released from their obligation and were free to choose their
employer and place of employment. Emigrants were commonly charged two to
three times the amount paid by the recruiters.
Estimates of Chinese migration outflows to selected Southeast Asian countries for
the period 1851 –1925 are shown in Table 1 below.
Table 1. Estimated Population Outflows from China to Selected Southeast Asian
Countries, 1851-1925 (thousands)
Year
Malaya
Indonesia
Philippines
1851-75
350
250
45
1876-1900
360
320
20
1901-25
125
300
n.a.
n.a. = not available.
Source: Adapted from Lynn Pan, ‘Patterns of Migration’ in Lynn Pan (General ed.), The
Encyclopaedia of the Chinese Overseas (Singapore: Archipelago Press for the Chinese Heritage
Centre, 2000), p. 62.
As shown above, Malaya and Indonesia recorded the largest number of Chinese
migrant workers.
Indian labour migration to Burma and Malaya in the late nineteenth century was an
important dimension of British colonialism in Southeast Asia. Compared to the
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Amarjit Kaur
Chinese, Indians formed an important minority only in these two states where they
filled a critical need in the urban manufacturing sector (Burma) and the plantation
sector (Malaya). Their importance declined after World War Two, both in absolute
and comparative terms. There were fewer millionaires and traders among them and
their emigration to these territories was largely regulated by law. Moreover, the
specific political and economic relationship between the Colonial Office in London,
the Indian Government and these territories determined recruitment patterns and
influenced employment relations and working conditions (Kaur, in press).
The comparative flows of Indian immigrants to Burma and Malaya for the period
1910-35 are shown in Figure 1 below.
Figure 1: Burma and Malaya: Comparative Flows of Indian Immigrants, 1910-35
(selected years)
400000
350000
300000
250000
Burma
200000
Malaya
150000
100000
50000
0
1910
1915
1920
1925
1930
1935
Source: After K.S. Sandhu, Indians in Malaya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p.
157, cited in Amarjit Kaur, ‘Indian Labour, Labour Standards, and Workers’ Health in Burma and
Malaya, 1900-1940’, Modern Asian Studies (in press).
The main mechanism for recruiting Chinese and Indian migrant labour was the
indenture contract, whereby employers used sanctions to enforce wage labour
agreements. The workers were contracted to a single employer for between one and
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208
three years. The contract was usually a written one but verbal agreements were also
common. Wage workers were thus not employees at will, but were often bound to
their employment by enforceable labour agreements, which employers used where
available to manage their labour costs and supply. Breaches of written contracts
were regarded as criminal, not civil offences. At the end of the contract, the worker
had to repay the travel and associated costs (or these were paid through deductions)
before he was released from his contract. Since most workers were too poor (they
earned very low wages), they were reindentured for a further period. Indenture was
abolished in 1910 (Indians) and 1914 (Chinese) in Malaya. In both Chinese and
Indian migration streams, there was a substantial minority of migrants who paid
their own passage or relied on friends and relatives, and the Chinese clearly
outnumbered the Indians in this regard. By the 1930s Chinese and Indian migrant
workers represented the largest migrant communities in Southeast Asia. Their
impact on the host societies varied, depending on their numerical strength and
economic roles.
In contrast to labour migration from outside the region, labour migration within the
Southeast Asian countries during the colonial period was of relatively lesser
significance. This was principally because the majority of the Southeast Asian
countries were fairly lightly populated, as noted previously. Migration within
Southeast Asia was basically of four kinds: migration into empty land; migration
from rural areas to town and industry; migration to government-sponsored
agricultural settlement projects outside densely populated areas; and migration
from the poorer, and overpopulated regions to ‘richer’ countries.
For migrants of the first kind, Lower Burma before 1900 offers the best example.
The opening of the Burma delta led to migration southwards from Central and
Upper Burma. Subsequently, other migrants came as seasonal labour, often
receiving payment in kind. The second type of migration, from rural areas to towns,
was an integral part of colonial development, and was found in most countries. The
best example of the third type is the migration from densely populated Java to
agricultural settlement projects in the Outer Islands in the first decade of the
twentieth century. Migration from Java to regions/countries offering wages/better
wages became typical in the early twentieth century, to the extent that geographical
proximity, and the laws of the source and receiving countries permitted. This
migration was of indentured labour, recruited through intermediaries, and bound by
sanctions. Thus indentured Javanese labour went to Sumatra, Malaya and Sabah,
while indentured migrants from northern Indochina went to Cochin-china. These
migrants, who were unskilled labourers, formed most of the migrant labour force in
Sumatra and Cochin-china, compared to the Chinese and Indians in other countries.
2. Sojourning and Settlement: The Malayan Experience
Malaya stands out both in the overall magnitude of migrants and the creation of a
plural society, and its demographic foundations were laid in the first three decades
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Amarjit Kaur
of the 20th century. There were three main explanations for this demographic
transformation: The first was the policy of unrestricted immigration; the necessity
to ensure a planned and regulated migrant labour supply; and the need to avoid
over-dependence on any one group (Kaur 2004, ch 4). A pattern of differential
treatment for migrants based on ethnicity was also established, which was to have
major implications for labour migration into Malaya after independence in 1957.
A liberal immigration policy underpinned the colonial government’s migration
goals and immigration remained largely unrestricted until the 1930s, when some
quotas were introduced on alien immigration. Nevertheless, these restrictions never
attained the importance they did until after Malaya achieved independence. Three
considerations shaped the Malayan administration’s migrant labour policy: the
acquisition of a plentiful, diversified, and cheap labour supply for colonial
undertakings and capitalist enterprise; the (limited) assurance of the labourer’s
freedom of movement; and the provision of a limited amount of protection for
workers. This protection was provided either through the aegis of Labour
departments (for Indians and Indonesians) or Protectorates for the Chinese. The
diversified recruitment policy meant that migrant labour could be manipulated
easily and ensured that workers were not easily assimilated or readily accepted by
the local inhabitants.
The three main racial groups – Malay, Chinese and Indian – were divided along
lines of religion, occupation, and geographical distribution. Few of the Chinese and
Indian migrants came with the intention of settling permanently in Malaya. Indeed,
the emigrant flow was often as large as the immigrant flow, and mortality rates
among the migrants were high (Kaur 2004:chs.3 and 4). Moreover, most migrant
workers migrated as young adult males. The Chinese government also took
‘precautions’ to prevent women from being taken overseas. This prohibition was
later abolished in stages for the different dialect groups (Purcell 1965: 254).
The colonial administration viewed migrant workers as sojourners, to be
repatriated when the demand for their services no longer existed. Nor did they
confront the issue of granting full rights to the more settled migrant category,
which would have been at odds with the stated policy of ‘ruling’ Malaya for the
Malays. This policy was also consistent with the policy of placing restrictions on
Chinese and Indian agricultural settlement. Interestingly, the British both viewed
and treated Javanese migrants differently, since they were regarded as originating
from the same racial stock as the Malays. Unrestricted migration and the policy of
favouring Indonesians meant that the Indonesians migrants (who also came as
agriculturalists), invariably settled in Malaya.
In the case of the Indians, settlement was facilitated by the paternalistic policy of
the Indian Government towards Indian emigration. As noted previously, Indian
migrant workers were mainly single adult males. Married men were discouraged
from emigrating because they could not bring their families since wages were low;
the norm of payment was a single person wage; working conditions were harsh;
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210
and accommodation was available for single men only. After 1922, the Indian
government gave greater prominence to the issue of gender imbalance among
emigrants and its concerns were embodied in subsequent legislation. Furthermore,
amendments to the Labour Code in Malaya stipulated the provision of rooms for
married couples as well as childcare and educational facilities. Thus legislation and
the provision of childcare centres of some sort, which facilitated Indian women’s
participation in the paid workforce, was consistent with increased female
immigration and greater permanent Indian settlement in Malaya (Ramachandran
1994:32).
In the case of the Chinese, the transition from sojourning to settlement occurred
when the immigration of Chinese women to Malaya increased markedly in the
early twentieth century, thus altering the demographic profile of the Chinese
community. In the 1930s too, a quota was imposed on male Chines migrants but
Chinese women were allowed entry into the country, consistent with government
policy of encouraging settlement and improving the gender ratio in the Chinese
community
This demographic change was reflected in the Malayan census figures. The
population of Malaya increased from approximately 2.6 million in 1911 to 7.7
million in 1957 (Sandhu 1969:175) The growth and racial composition of the
population of Malaya (excluding Singapore) from 1921-57 is shown in Figure 2.
Indeed, by 1957 the immigrants exceeded the number of Malays (despite
settlement by Indonesians) and this had widespread consequences for future
migration goals and policies.
2.1. Border Controls and Immigration Policy until 1957
Turning to colonial migration goals, despite an earlier commitment to unrestricted
immigration, new legislation introduced in the 1930s placed restrictions on the
entry of Chinese. The new legislation represented the first attempts by the colonial
state to use ‘borders’ as a means of keeping out a specific racial group. The
rationale to exclude entry was based both on economic and security/political
motives, as discussed below.
Briefly, three phases may be distinguished in colonial immigration policy and goals.
These goals were consistent with patterns in world trade and the demand for
Malaya’s export commodities; economic conditions in the country; and labour
activitism among migrant workers. During the first phase, 1900-1927, the country
witnessed the expansion of the tin and rubber industries and the entry of thousands
of migrant workers to labour in these industries. For all three groups: Chinese,
Indian and Indonesian, entry was completely free and unrestricted. There was,
nevertheless, repatriation of some groups of unemployed workers during depressed
economic conditions in the 1920s.
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Amarjit Kaur
Figure 2: Peninsular Malaysia: Population Growth By Race, 1921-57
3.500.000
3.000.000
2.500.000
2.000.000
Malays
Chinese
Indians
1.500.000
1.000.000
500.000
0
1921
1931
1947
1957
Source: Saw Swee Hock, The Population of Peninsular Malaysia (Singapore: Singapore University
Press, 1989), p. 54.
During the second phase, 1928–1938, the British enacted the first piece of
restrictive legislation in the Straits Settlements (SS), the Immigration Restriction
Ordinance (IRO), in 1928, empowering the Governor of the SS to regulate or
prohibit immigration ‘for the purposes of performing domestic or manual labour
whenever the influx of immigrants threatened unemployment, caused economic
distress or was not in the public interest’ (Parmer 1960:92). This legislation, though
applicable to all immigrants, was directed at the Chinese, particularly those of a
‘criminal type’. It was viewed as an important instrument to deal with the Chinese
since the state lacked legislation to manage Chinese migrants following the
abolition of Chinese indentured labour in 1914. This legislation had two major
ramifications. It enabled the colonial government to establish a basic framework
for border controls and empowered it with the means to control the entry of labour
deemed surplus to the requirements of the country.
Although initially no immediate measures were taken to restrict immigration, from
1930 the state adopted a restrictive immigration policy. This policy was consistent
with worsening world trade as a consequence of the Great Depression, rising
unemployment and depressed economic conditions in the country. The closure of
some tin mines and rubber estates prompted the government to impose a monthly
quota on adult Chinese male immigration from August 1930 (Saw 1988:15). For
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212
the Indians, the British implemented a policy of repatriation of the unemployed and
the destitute. (Unemployed Chinese were also repatriated).
Notwithstanding this, it soon became apparent that there were several loopholes in
the IRO legislation. The IRO could only be resorted to during emergency situations,
and it did not include provision for internal enforcement measures over immigrants
once they had landed in the country. By this time too there were growing calls
among Malay nationalists for increased restrictions on the immigration of ‘alien’
Asians. These calls not surprisingly coincided with competition for jobs, especially
in the public sector.
In January 1933 the IRO was replaced by the Aliens Ordinance (AO) in the Straits
Settlement (SS). This legislation was essentially designed to ‘regulate the
admission of aliens in accordance with the political, social, and economic needs for
the moment of the various administrations in Malaya’ and ‘to provide a means of
registering and controlling aliens resident in Malaya’ (Parmer 1960:93). This
legislation too was directed at the Chinese since Indians were classified as British
subjects.
The AO subsequently led to the creation of an Immigration Department in the SS.
Complementary legislation enacted in the Federated Malay States (FMS) and the
Unfederated Malay States (UMS) saw the establishment of similar departments in
these administrative units. All matters pertaining to Chinese immigration were
transferred from the Chinese Protectorate to the Immigration Departments.
Critically, the AO provided the necessary mechanism for the registration of aliens
resident in Malaya and was the first step in the development of internal
enforcement measures over immigrants in Malaya. Although registration was not
made compulsory, aliens who left the country with the intention of returning were
required to obtain a certificate prior to departure in order to qualify for subsequent
readmittance without being subject to quotas.
Malayan-born Chinese were not affected by the AO ruling. Non-Malayan born
Indonesians were exempted from the AO’s ruling since the Governor-in-Council
was empowered to set aside this legislation for specific groups of aliens originating
from a particular place or country. Initially all Indonesians and women and
children were exempted from this ruling. Thus Chinese women were exempted,
consistent with the policy of improving the gender ratio in the Chinese community.
Nevertheless, continuing unemployment led to the cancellation of this exemption
for Chinese women in 1938. This change also coincided with labour unrest in the
country and a continuation of the policy of deportation of ‘undesirables’. The AO
thus defined the status of Chinese as aliens in Malaya and interestingly, the term
encompassed a large number of Chinese who had settled in Malaya but still
retained their Chinese citizenship. Chinese immigration to Malaya came to an end
following the outbreak of World War Two (Saw 1988:16). Indonesian labour
migration, however, continued to be encouraged by the British.
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There were some interesting developments for Indians as well. Although Indians
did not fall under the purview of the AO, the British deported a number of
‘undesirable’ Indian labour activists in the latter half of the 1930s. In 1938 too the
Indian Government banned all assisted Indian emigration to Malaya in response to
the demands of Indian nationalists lobbying for improvements in the working
conditions and political privileges of Indian labour (Kaur 2004: ch. 4).
During the third phase, 1947-57, the AO was replaced by the Immigration
Ordinance (IO) of 1953. This Ordinance resulted in even more stringent border
controls and laid down for the first time the specific composition of migrants
allowed entry into Malaya. Unlike the earlier restrictions based on ‘alien’ identity
and gender, the IO also specified nationality and occupation and thus placed
greater emphasis on the skills of the migrants. Permanent entry was restricted to,
first, persons who could ‘contribute to the expansion of commerce and industry’;
second, to persons who could provide ‘specialised services not available locally’;
third to ‘families of local residents; and fourth to other persons on ‘special
compassionate grounds’ (Saw 1988:17). Clearly, this legislation was in tune with
nationalist sentiment in the country. New stipulations required potential immigrants
to have job contracts of at least two years with Malayan firms and earn a salary of
not less than M$400 a month.
The ending of colonial rule in Malaya was noteworthy for two major reasons. First,
in the area of immigration policy, more restrictive legislation was implemented to
halt unskilled Chinese and Indian immigration into Malaya and this was largely
dictated by economic and socio-political considerations. Second, border controls
and internal enforcement measures assumed greater importance, coinciding with
the prevailing political conditions in the country after the Second World War. The
Malayan Emergency 1948-60) in particular resulted in the introduction of the
Internal Security Act, and a compulsory system of identification cards for all
residents aged twelve years and over. The identity cards categorised people on the
basis of their nationality and residential/occupational status and, in effect, created
the outsider. Both these internal enforcement measures are an enduring legacy of
colonial rule, and have been adapted/modified to suit the needs of the national state
in the face of global pressures and the ‘new’ migrant labour market in Southeast
Asia.
3. Race, Borders and International Labour Migration in Southeast
Asia since the 1970s
3.1. Introduction: Economic and Social Change in Southeast Asia since the
1970s
By the 1970s, following the various problems of decolonisation and post-war
readjustment in Southeast Asia, there had emerged two broad groups of countries
in the region. There were those that, under Communist or Socialist regimes,
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214
withdrew from the international economy to a large extent. These included
Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, whose trading relations were concentrated on
Eastern-Bloc countries, and Burma, which remained politically neutral and became
economically isolated. This group of countries experienced economic stagnation
and continued to have per capita incomes among the lowest in the world. The other
countries, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines (and later Indonesia)
maintained open economies under various regimes. These experienced significant,
though uneven, economic development. Most impressive was Singapore, which
was the first Southeast Asian country to become a newly-industrialising country
(NIC), alongside Taiwan, South Korea, and Hong Kong.
Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines embraced trade liberalisation in
the 1970s and 1980s; turned towards policies that involved more open trade
regimes, and gave export trade and foreign investment a central place in their
development strategy. Associated with this was the making of comparative
advantage through specific trade policy initiatives. These policies were not
dependent on natural resource endowment, but rather on the creation of low-cost
manufacturing advantage. They were consistent also with the establishment of
manufacturing enclaves for global production in the form of export-processing
zones, particularly in Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, and later Thailand.
These global production enclaves facilitated cross-country relocation of
manufacturing, assisted by continuing technical progress in transport and
communications.
These countries’ economic record was remarkable prior to the Asian financial
crisis. In 1995, for example, Singapore’s GDP per capita was US$22 600 and it
made the transition to developed country status. The GDP per capita of the other
countries was as follows: Malaysia, US$10 400; Thailand, US$8000; Indonesia,
US$3800; and the Philippines US$2800, all at 1995 purchasing power parity
equivalents (Kaur 2004:ch.8). Thus not all benefited at the same rate.
At the same time there were striking demographic differences between these
countries. Singapore and Malaysia had undergone demographic transition
(followed by Thailand later) and experienced significant tightening of their labour
markets. In 1995, for example, the population of the five countries was as follows:
Singapore, 3.3 million; Malaysia, 20.1 million; Thailand, 58.2 million; Indonesia,
166.5 million and the Philippines 67.8 million.
The demographic differences between the five countries were critical to changing
labour circumstances in the region. Indonesia and the Philippines not only had
larger populations compared with Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand but also had
higher levels of landlessness, rural poverty and unemployment. Indonesia,
moreover, also had low levels of development in terms of specific social indicators
such as education. Moreover, in Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand the increase in
labour market participation by women was a source of workforce expansion in the
short and medium term only. The problems of a high proportion of employment in
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low-productivity agriculture, rural poverty and land scarcity in both Indonesia and
the Philippines led to varying labour market conditions in the region, and labour
thus had an incentive to move from Indonesia and the Philippines (and, to a lesser
extent, Thailand), to Singapore, Malaysia and elsewhere.
The question then arises: Have these labour processes become more and more part
of a chain of interconnecting links in Southeast Asia’s development experience? Is
the Asia-Pacific region the ‘newest migratory pole’ (OECD 1992; Salt 1992)? The
record is a clear indication of this trend. According to the International Labour
Office, of the approximately 81 million migrants worldwide, 22 million work in
Asia (ILO 2004: 7). Moreover, ‘migrant worker remittances represent the second
biggest international monetary trade flow, exceeded only by petroleum exports’
(Director-General ILO 2000). In Southeast Asia, for example, Filipino migrant
workers remitted US$6 billion in 2000 and overseas contract workers were one of
the country’s biggest sources of foreign exchange (Economist, 22 December 2001).
3.2. Race, Gender and Migration Patterns
Prior to 1998, migrant workers (principally from Indonesia, the Philippines and
Thailand) comprised between 20-25 per cent of the labour force in Malaya and
Singapore and were predominantly unskilled or semi-skilled workers (Kaur 2004:
ch.9). More significantly, certain occupations or types of economic activity rely on
foreign workers for their continued operation. Domestic work, for example, is
typical of the labour market segmentation associated with growing prosperity in
Malaysia and Singapore. Jobs at the lower rungs of the skill and wage distribution
categories are shunned by locals and are filled by foreign migrant workers.
Consequently, this reliance on foreign workers is due to structural factors rather
than being cyclical in nature (Athukorala and Manning 1999:2; Manning 2002).
Indeed, Southeast Asian economies appear to function in a complementary sense,
arising from inter-country demographic contrasts; the incidence of labour surplus
or shortage; disparities in demand and wages; and worker education and skills, all
of which have created strong incentives for intra-Southeast Asian migration. An
important feature of this labour migration is the institutionalisation of that
movement by the countries involved and the growth of a migration industry (Hugo
1993a, 1993b; Ball 1997). Moreover, Singapore and Malaysia admit skilled and
unskilled workers as a regular policy, and in the case of the latter category, impose
levies on companies hiring unskilled foreign workers to discourage excessive
reliance on them.
Crucially, labour migration needs to be understood in the context of transnational
economic developments. These are essential to any analysis of the relationship of
globalisation to migration, since much of the labour migration does not operate
spontaneously, but takes place within networks, both within the source and
receiving countries. Chain migration, for example, within family, extended kinship,
or close-knit village-based groups, plays a key role in disseminating information
Race, Migration and Borders in Southeast Asia
216
about opportunities available in Malaysia and Singapore. Moreover, it minimises
both financial and removal disruption costs that migrants face.
This cost minimising factor is critical for two reasons. First, unlike the colonial
period, ethnicity and social class have become even more pronounced in migration
patterns, and there is both overt and covert hostility to migrants by governments
and certain segments of the populations in receiving countries. Additionally, the
migrants are forced into segmented labour markets that are characterised by wage
discrimination, and this has led to social tensions. Second, and more importantly,
migrants, their families and prospective employers have to bear the bulk of the
financial and social costs associated with migration.
Seven main factors have shaped (and continue to shape) the new migration patterns.
First, both the Philippines and Indonesia view labour emigration as a means of
addressing domestic unemployment, generating foreign exchange and promoting
economic growth. The Indonesian government thus included targets for the number
of workers it hoped to send overseas in its five-year economic development plans.
These targets have risen over time. For example, in the economic development plan
for 1979-84, the target was 100 000 workers; for 1994-99, the target was 1.25
million workers, and for 1999-2003, the target increased to 2.8 million workers
(Hugo 2002:160-61; Kaur 2004: ch.9).
Second, although poverty is not the principal determinant of migration, many
migrants from Indonesia and the Philippines bound for Malaya and elsewhere
come from very poor areas such as Lombok in Indonesia. But they are not from the
‘poorest’ category, as they have to put up substantial amounts of money to get to
their destinations. The three main source or sending countries in Southeast Asia are
Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand, all of which recorded strong economic
growth in the last three decades of the twentieth century up to 1997. Migrants from
these labour-surplus countries and elsewhere acquired the means to move to
countries like Malaysia and Singapore, which experienced sustained and robust
economic growth and where there were labour-shortages and substantial
differences in wage rates for both skilled and unskilled workers.
Third, faced with labour shortages, Singapore and Malaysia formulated policies
and introduced mechanisms for labour intake targets in consultation with large
national employer associations, and in co-operation with governments of sending
countries. Their policies are aimed at managing foreign labour flows and at the
same time facilitating growth by targeting an appropriate skills mix. Nevertheless,
owing to the administrative costs involved, and the insertion of quotas especially
for unskilled contract labour intakes, illegal migration constitutes an important part
of the migration streams. Policing people-smugglers and illegal migrants thus
represents an important element in the complex and multicentred migration
processes in these countries.
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Fourth, unlike the labour migration of the colonial period, when migrants were
directed largely towards the plantation and mining sectors, the new unskilled
migrant workers are concentrated predominantly in the tertiary sector in manual
and service employment, with little direct foreign capital involvement. They are
employed in four main sectors: agriculture and forestry; construction; services,
especially entertainment and domestic work; and manufacturing. This pattern is
consistent with the expansion of tourism and the service industries and is
associated with rising levels of prosperity and consumerism among the middle
classes in Southeast Asia. Skilled migrants (for example, professionals and
technicians) interact differently with the labour market. They also receive
preferential treatment in the host countries (in Singapore they are able to obtain
permanent residence after a period of two years).
A fifth significant feature is the growing interconnections between traditional
cross-border flows and the more recent forms of migration in areas where there are
shared land borders. The phenomenon of daily commuting workers has existed on
the Singapore-Johor and Malaysia-Thailand borders since the 1950s at least. In
recent years, the Malaysian government has sought to restrict movement along the
Thai-Malaysian border and also the movement of undocumented Indonesian
workers by sea. Notwithstanding this, the dynamics of demography and
development between Sarawak and Kalimantan have resulted in the two
governments co-operating in the establishment of a number of large projects at the
Entikong-Tebedu Border post area (Agustiar 2000:235). This development is part
of the growth triangle and sub-regional economic zone arrangements involving
Indonesia, Malaysia and Southern Philippines (Mindanao).
Sixth, unlike the earlier globalisation era, when migrant workers were
predominantly young, adult males who migrated without dependants, a large
percentage of the new migrant workers are predominantly women. This
feminisation of the new migrant labour may be attributed to two main factors. The
first is linked to general changes in the labour markets in Southeast Asia and the
production niches (mass-customisation products – electronics, textiles, garments)
of Southeast Asian states. The New International Division of Labour, which
facilitated the increased labour force participation of women in the labour-intensive
manufacturing sector, was consistent with modernisation of the agricultural sector
and rural-urban migration, principally of women. There was also a trend towards
migration abroad since women’s employment in the urban labour market was often
impermanent, irregular, and insecure. The second factor is related to the maturing
of the labour markets in Singapore and Malaysia, coinciding with relatively high
labour force participation rates of women, and general labour shortages in these
countries. This in turn has created an increased demand for domestic work and
childcare services, which has been met by migrant women workers from the lowerincome Southeast Asian countries. Thus the specific labour needs in the receiving
countries for domestic workers largely shaped and continue to shape women’s
migration in Southeast Asia.
Race, Migration and Borders in Southeast Asia
218
Finally, a significant characteristic of the new labour migration is that this
migration (particularly of unskilled workers) is short term and contract-bound, not
unlike the labour migration of the colonial period. However, the main difference is
that this migration is the migration of free persons, whether dependent on networks
or organised through intermediaries. All documented workers have to pay hefty
fees – agency fees (including a one way air ticket); insurance fees, a bank
guarantee – in both countries, but they cannot stay in the receiving countries on
completion of their contracts. They are therefore precluded from making the
transition from sojourning to settlement under the complex guest worker
recruitment system. Employers pay their return tickets and face heavy fines if
workers are not sent back. In Singapore and Malaysia, unskilled workers who
overstay are often physically punished. As noted above, skilled migrants face fewer
problems, given their qualifications and bargaining power.
4. The Malaysian State, Migration and Border Controls
4.1. Introduction
The migration goals of the newly independent Malayan state mirrored the colonial
administration’s goals of the 1950s. The Immigration Act of 1959, which came into
force on 1 May 1959, replaced the earlier 1953 Ordinance. The new legislation was
designed to tighten entry under the third clause (reunification of families) outlined
earlier by prohibiting the entry of wives and children of local residents who had
been living separately from their husbands for a continuous period of five years
after December 1954 and children of citizens who were six years or more of age.
Migration goals also served to restrict both the quantity and influence the quality of
migrants. Essentially, the principal objectives were to safeguard the employment
and livelihood of Malayan residents and to bring about further assimilation in the
country.
Following the formation of Malaysia in 1963, the Employment Restriction Act was
implemented by the state in 1968 and made access to the labour market for noncitizens contingent upon possession of a work permit. The work permit was also
designed to ensure that only skilled non-citizen migrants were permitted entry into
the country. Thus the nation state essentially became a closed labour market and
citizenship conferred both the right to reside and to work in the country. Aliens
who had not taken out citizenship had to leave or were repatriated. Nevertheless,
although unskilled immigration was ended, a shared ethnicity, language and
cultural base with Indonesia meant that unskilled Indonesians workers continued to
make their way to Malaysia since they were not classified as outsiders (Indonesian
migration briefly ceased during the period of Konfrontasi with Indonesia).
Subsequently, the implementation of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1970,
following the May 1969 race riots in the country (see Kaur 2001:165, 220-1) had
major repercussions for the labour market. The two principal objectives of the NEP
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were the reduction and eventual eradication of poverty, irrespective of race; and the
elimination of the identification of race with economic function. The second
objective primarily implied reducing the concentration of Malays in subsistence
agriculture and increasing their employment in the modern agricultural and urban
sectors of the economy. Thus the state enlarged the bureaucracy, creating whitecollar jobs for Malays; increased state participation in the economy and created a
whole range of occupations for Malays. The NEP coincided with an expansion in
educational facilities, and the tightening of the labour market. The prospect of
better-paid urban jobs also led to a change in attitude among the Malays towards
remaining in rural areas. Total employment in the primary sector rose from 1.7
million in 1970 to 2 million in 1982, but then fell to 1.8 million by 1990 (Drabble
2000:248).
For the Chinese and Indians, these discriminatory policies had two main
consequences. First, there was a growing trend towards smaller family size in these
communities partly as a reaction to a perceived cut in their slice of the cake.
Second, those who had the means chose to migrate overseas, to countries like
Japan, Singapore, or Taiwan, where there were better employment opportunities.
Others went to countries like Canada and Australia as permanent migrants. At the
end of the 1980s too, the main labour constraints facing Malaysia lay in shortages
in the professional and technical fields. Nevertheless, in conjunction with changes
in the international division of labour, and the making of comparative advantage in
low-cost export manufactures, labour shortages emerged in several sectors in
Malaysia. This coincided with the implementation of large-scale development and
infrastructure projects and heralded a new phase in Malaysia’s migration goals.
Subsequently, the Malaysian state formulated new policies and introduced
mechanisms for labour intake targets in consultation with large national employer
associations, and in co-operation with the Indonesian and other governments.
Moreover, government policies are aimed at managing foreign labour flows and at
the same time facilitating growth by targeting an appropriate skills mix.
Nevertheless, owing to the administrative costs involved, and the insertion of
quotas especially for unskilled contract labour intakes, illegal migration constituted
(and continues to constitute) an integral feature of the migration streams.
4.2. Migration, Borders and Race: Lessons from the colonial past?
As noted previously, migrant workers comprise about 25 per cent of the labour
force in Malaysia and it is estimated that approximately 83 per cent of these
workers are Indonesian (Human Rights Watch 2004:10). This development is a
consequence of state migration goals and labour recruitment policies since the
1970s. Nevertheless, although Malaysia’s labour requirements and preference for
Indonesians underpinned its migration goals, other issues have now surfaced and a
diversified recruitment policy is once again becoming influential in shaping
migration policy.
Race, Migration and Borders in Southeast Asia
220
Generally, the Malaysian state has alternated between tightening immigration
controls and loosening them through bilateral agreements and amnesties since the
1970s. Four distinct phases may be distinguished in the Malaysian state’s
migration policy. During the first phase, 1970-1980, government followed a liberal
policy towards foreign worker recruitment. Employers either hired Indonesian
labour domiciled in the country in squatter settlements or from Indonesia through
private labour brokers for the plantation and construction sectors. During the
second phase, 1981-88, foreign labour recruitment was legalised; an official
channel was created for labour recruitment; and bilateral agreements signed with
governments of sending countries. Thus in 1982 a Committee for the Recruitment
of Foreign Workers was established and in 1984 the Malaysian government signed
a bilateral agreement (the Medan Agreement) with the Indonesian government for
the government-to government regulated supply of Indonesian workers for the
plantation sector and for domestic work (Kassim 1998). Nevertheless, migrant
workers continued to enter the country as irregular chain migrants using networkdependent and network –creating relationships.
During the third phase, 1989-96, a legalisation programme was commenced to halt
illegal immigration. Growing public disquiet against the more pronounced
visibility of Indonesian migrant workers prompted this programme, which had its
origins in the economic recession of 1985-6. Thus public sentiment and ‘societal
borders’ led to a change of policy and in 1989 the further importation of foreign
labour was frozen. Concurrently, a programme to legalise/regularise the status of
Indonesian migrants was implemented. Employers of undocumented workers were
encouraged to legalise/regularise their workers. However, this programme had
limited success since not many employers were willing to change the status of their
undocumented workers.
Additionally, the Malaysian government implemented an amnesty programme
during this period that was targeted initially at domestic workers and then extended
to workers in the plantation and construction sectors. Under this programme all
undocumented (‘illegal’) workers were required to register themselves at specific
registration centres in order to remain in the country as legal workers. Moreover,
the state deployed the Police Field Force to prevent illegal landings on Malaysia’s
coastlines. This third phase was also marked by the elimination of on-site illegal
recruitment of labour and the implementation of an official migrant labour
recruitment system based solely on offshore recruitment. During this period too the
Indonesian government established a single company (PT. Bijak) to oversee the
labour recruitment business and to provide a measure of control over recruitment
arrangements (Hugo 1995).
The fourth phase, since 1997, is distinguished by two important developments.
First, the financial and economic crisis of 1997-8 marked a turning point in state
policy towards foreign labour recruitment. Further efforts to control undocumented
migration were implemented; an amnesty programme was introduced that
permitted illegal migrants to depart without penalty and a work-permit system
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Amarjit Kaur
based solely on offshore recruitment was enforced. Moreover, workers have been
categorised more rigidly than before, employment permits are both location- and
employment- specific, and legislative and police measures to combat irregular
migration have been strengthened. Detention camps were also established to hold
undocumented workers. Furthermore, an amendment was made to the 2002
Immigration Act that resulted in harsh punishments for immigration violations. It is
now a criminal offence for foreign workers to work without a work permit or visa,
and punitive measures, including caning of workers has been implemented.
Moreover, errant employers are also subject to fines, imprisonment and strokes of
the cane (or whipping) (New Straits Times 12 October 2003).
But the major change has been in the origin of migrant workers. The Malaysian
government’s recent legislation is designed to reduce dependence on any one racial
group through a diversified recruitment policy and employers are required to
provide segregated housing and transport facilities. Health too has become a major
issue and migrant workers are tested for pregnancy, human immuno-deficiency
virus (HIV), and other infections, including malaria and tuberculosis, prior to
departure for Malaysia. The emergence of Southeast Asia and Malaysia as the
epicenter of new infectious diseases has also resulted in increased epidemiological
surveillance, which has been incorporated legally and bureaucratically into the
sphere of migration regulation.
In summary, the rising expectations of Southeast Asians; and their ability to move
to labour shortage countries, has impacted, and is impacting on the region’s labour
market. Migration has taken on a new urgency in the face of intensified global
economic pressures and problems associated with demographic and social
transformations. The growing presence of foreign workers has also sparked debates
about the social and economic consequences of foreign labour inflows. It appears
that the management of foreign workers is premised on the policy that settlement is
to be denied to them. At the same time, the desire to keep labour costs down and
the slowness of some sectors to restructure continue to present a dilemma to
Malaysia.
References
AGUSTIAR, MEMET. 2000. “Indonesian
workers in Sarawak: the direction of the
daily commuting workers via EntikongTebedu Border Post”. In: M. Leigh, ed.,
Borneo 2000: Language, Management and
Tourism, 235–44. Kuching: Universiti
Malaysia Sarawak/Sarawak Development
Institute.
PREMA-CHANDRA
and
ATHUKORALA,
MANNING, CHRIS. 1999. Structural Change
and International Migration in East Asia
Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
BALL, R. 1997. “The role of the state in the
globalisation of labour markets: the case of
the Philippines”. Environment
and
Planning A, 29: 1603–28.
DRABBLE, J. 2000. An Economic History of
Malaysia, c. 1800–1990: The Transition to
Modern Economic Growth. Basingstoke:
Macmillan.
Race, Migration and Borders in Southeast Asia
Economist, 22 December 2001.
HUGO, G. 1993a. “Indonesian labour
migration to Malaysia: trends and policy
implications”. Southeast Asian Journal of
Social Science 27 (1): 36–70.
HUGO, G. 1993b. “International labour
migration”. In: C. Manning and J.
Hardjono, eds., Indonesia Assessment 1993
– Labour: Sharing in the Benefits of
Growth?, 108–26 (Political and Social
Change Monograph). Canberra: Research
School of Pacific and Asian Studies.
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KAUR, A. In press. “Indian labour, labour
standards, and workers’ health in Burma
and Malaya, 1900–1940”. Modern Asian
Studies.
MANNING, C. 2002. “Structural change,
economic crisis and international labour
migration in East Asia”. The World
Economy 25 (3): 359–85.
New Straits Times, 12 October 2003.
OECD. 1992. Trends in International
Migration.
Paris:
Organisation
for
Economic Co-operation and Development.
HUGO, G. 2002. “Women’s international
labour migration”. In: K. Robinson and S.
Bessell, eds., Women in Indonesia: Gender,
Equity
and
Development,
158–78.
Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian
Studies.
PAN, L. 2000. “Patterns of migration”. In:
Lynn Pan, gen. ed., The Encyclopaedia of
the
Chinese
Overseas.
Singapore:
Archipelago Press for the Chinese Heritage
Centre.
HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH. 2004. Help Wanted:
Abuses Against Female Migrant Domestic
Workers in Indonesia and Malaysia
16 (9)(B).
PARMER, N. 1960. Colonial Labor Policy and
Administration: A History of Labor in the
Rubber Plantation Industry in Malaya
Locust. Valley, NY: J.J. Augustin for the
Association for Asian Studies,.
ILO. 2004. Towards a Fair Deal for Migrant
Workers in the Global Economy. Geneva,
International Labour Organization.
KASSIM, AZIZAH. 1998. “Household study on
Indonesian immigrants in Malaysia: an
insight into the consequences of their
migration, and their problems”. In: C.
Mulya Firdausy, ed., International
Migration in Southeast Asia, 143–88.
Jakarta: Indonesian Institute of Sciences.
KAUR, A. 2001. Historical Dictionary of
Malaysia, 2nd edn. New Jersey: Scarecrow
Press.
KAUR, A. 2004. Wage Labour in Southeast
Asia since 1840: Globalisation, the
International Division of Labour and
Labour Transformations. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
PURCELL, V. 1965. The Chinese in Southeast
Asia, 2nd edn. London: Oxford University
Press.
RAMACHANDRAN, SELVAKUMARAN. 1994.
Indian Plantation Labour in Malaya. Kuala
Lumpur: S. Abdul Majeed & Co. for
Institute of Social Analysis (INSAN).
SALT, J. 1992. “The future of international
labour migration”. International Migration
Review 26 (4): 1077–1111.
SAW, SWEE HOCK. 1989. The Population of
Peninsular Malaysia. Singapore: Singapore
University Press.
About the Author:
Amarjit Kaur is Professor of Economic History at the University of New England
in Armidale, Australia. Her main research contributions have been in the study of
Malaysian and Southeast Asian economic development and social change, with a
focus on labour issues (women, child and migrant workers) and the environmental
223
Amarjit Kaur
impacts of development. She is currently working on a project on Border Controls
and Labour Migration in Southeast Asia. Kaur's most recent publications include
Wage Labour in Southeast Asia since 1840: Globalisation, the International
Division of Labour and Labour Transformations (Palgrave/Macmillan: 2004), and
an edited book, Women Workers in Industrialising Asia: Costed, not valued
(Palgrave/Macmillan: 2004). Email: akaur@pobox.une.edu.au
Is State Sovereignty Declining? An Exploration
of Asylum Policy in Japan
HIDEKI TARUMOTO*
Hokkaido University
The case of asylum seekers is a good test of whether or not, and if so
why, state sovereignty is declining in advanced countries owing to the
rise of the international human rights regime. Some researchers argue
that the international asylum regime based on the 1951 Refugee
Convention, its 1967 Protocol and the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees, has had an impact on the state in asylum
policy. Others insist that the state restricts its sovereignty because of
domestic factors: pro-asylum constitutions or powerful parliaments.
In comparison, Japan retains tight asylum policy through its
“singular bureaucratic sovereignty” led by the Ministry of Justice.
Since the late 1990s the numbers of refugee status grantees have
increased. This has resulted from changes in the domestic political
system after the collapse of one-party dominance, rather than by the
effect of the international regime. In addition, inter-state relations
with China and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea involving
Japan’s international reputation, triggered by the Shenyang incident
in 2002, entailed the setting up of a special committee on refugee
issues within the ministry, which is leading Japan towards a slightly
laxer asylum policy.
I
s state sovereignty declining? Is the state losing its capacity to control the flow
of migrants because of globalisation? State sovereignty is involved with the
“assertion of final authority within a given territory” and “efforts to control the
transborder movements of people, goods, capital, and culture” (Krasner 1988, 86).
Declining efficacy of immigration control is one of the main hypotheses in
migration studies (Cornelius et al. 1994; Freeman 1992, 1994, 1998; Joppke 1998a,
1998b). All advanced countries “unwillingly” accept “unwanted immigrants” such
as family members of already settled migrants, illegal immigrants and asylum
seekers of varying degrees. In researching the “challenge to the nation-state”, a
good test of whether the sovereignty of advanced countries is declining is the case
of asylum seekers, whose numbers have dramatically increased since the early
1980s. Asylum seekers, by definition, are excluded from the protection of their
own nation-states and are forced to seek asylum from potential receiving countries
(Castles 2003). A key to this discussion is the international human rights regime,
which may prevent the state from implementing an exclusionary policy towards
International Journal on Multicultural Societies (IJMS), Vol. 6, No. 2, 2004: 224 - 242
ISSN 1817-4574, www.unesco.org/shs/ijms/vol6/issue2/art2 © UNESCO
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asylum seekers. We need to ask whether the human rights regime, in resisting state
sovereignty, forces or induces potential receiving countries to create and/or
implement generous asylum policies.
The protection of human rights, including accepting asylum seekers, may not be an
external imposition but a constitutive principle of liberal nation-states (Joppke
1998a, 110). An exploration into a non-Western “liberal” nation-state, Japan, can
bring about a new perspective on the thesis of sovereignty decline. In this paper,
first of all, the ideas of the international asylum regime and of self-limited
sovereignty are investigated. Secondly, it is explained that Japan had been resisting
the international regime through its “singular bureaucratic sovereignty”, but
reached a small turning point in asylum policy around the late 1990s. Finally, it is
pointed out that a recently appointed Special Committee on Refugee Issues will
nudge Japanese asylum policy towards a slightly more generous approach.
1. The International Asylum Regime and Its Effects
1.1
The International Human Rights Regime
Following Krasner (1982, 185), international regimes are defined as “principles,
norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actor expectations
converge” in a given international issue. Some academics argue that state
sovereignty is declining because of norms established by the international human
rights regime. Jacobson (1996, 2) argues that “the basis of state legitimacy [in
North America and Western Europe] is shifting from principles of sovereignty and
national self-determination to international human rights”. In a more moderate way,
Soysal (1994, 136–62) claims that the “global system” is structured by the
“institutional duality” of national sovereignty and universal human rights.
It is not self-evident that human rights norms originating from the international
regime have constructed the basis of state legitimacy or “institutional duality”.
Although several common-law rules on treatment of foreigners had developed in
international law before the Second World War, it has been since the war that the
international human rights regime has significantly developed. The first step of this
development was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. The
Declaration was not legally binding for the countries of the United Nations,
reflecting the lack of consensus on the concept of human rights among the
participating countries of the day. Through a secondary development, the
international human rights regime emerged to take on the new characteristic of
being legally binding among ratifying states. This new international Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights was adopted in 1966 and came into effect in 1976.
Indeed, the international human rights regime may impose restrictions on state
sovereignty because the state has a duty to protect human rights of non-nationals
(Iwasawa 1998). But the core of state sovereignty has been preserved because the
covenants do not make reference to the entry and exit of migrants as being an
Is State Sovereignty Declining? Asylum Policy in Japan
226
individual right, leaving that to the discretion of the state. In addition, even if the
ratifying countries assume legal obligations, the international human rights regime
lacks an executive agency to embody human rights norms. Such points cast doubt
on the change to state legitimacy and institutional duality that human rights
internationalists mention as points in their debate.
1.2
Establishment of the Asylum Regime during the Cold War
The international asylum regime works in partnership with, and shares ideas with,
the international human rights regime, but it is a particular sub-regime directly
based on the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and the 1967
Protocol to the Convention. In contrast to the human rights regime, the asylum
regime has an executive agency, the United Nations High Commissioner for
Refugees (UNHCR), which was set up by the United Nations in 1951 and is in
charge of refugee issues around the world. Although the UNHCR is an agency with
limited purposes and weak enforcement capacity, it is an example of inter-state
cooperation seeking a truly international regime whose realisation the human rights
internationalists had hoped for.
In addition to the executive agency, another significant difference between the two
regimes is that the asylum regime necessarily infringes on the core of state
sovereignty, i.e. on the entry and exit of non-national migrants. The most notable
basis for restricting state discretion over entry and exit is the principle of nonrefoulement, codified in the 1951 Refugee Convention, which prohibits states from
sending refugees back to their countries of origin if they risk torture or death (see
Goodwin-Gill 1978).
Although state sovereignty is involved in a wide range of refugee issues such as
length of asylum, work permits, strict detention, dispersion within national
boundaries, and in-kind rather than money provisions, the principle of nonrefoulement is in sharp conflict with state sovereignty. Without even mentioning
any right of entry, the 1951 Refugee Convention places an obligation on the state
to permit entry of asylum seekers under certain conditions, regardless of its will.
Before the end of the 1980s, the contradiction between the principle of nonrefoulement and state sovereignty was not so clearly visible due to, for example,
the implacable ideological conflict between capitalism and socialism (see Joly
1996). During the Cold War, the thesis on sovereignty decline did not surface.
1.3
The Post-Cold War Era
In the mid-1970s, the international asylum regime began to face new situations
with asylum seekers. The oil crisis of 1973 put an end to the entry of economic
migrants into major advanced countries, and since then migrants have been
diversified into various categories such as family migrants, highly skilled workers,
asylum seekers, illegal immigrants and people from various parts of the world
including the crisis zones of post-colonial Africa and Asia (Castles and Miller
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Hideki Tarumoto
[1993] 1998). In addition, the issue of “bogus” refugees, who hide their economic
motives or criminal intent under the guise of refugee, became increasingly
prevalent. Asylum remained the only significant legal venue for new entrants in
most advanced countries (Freeman 1992, 1155). Along with “jet-age asylum
seeking” (Martin 1988), the diversification and increasing number of migrants have
imposed on the state the burden of distinguishing involuntary “genuine” asylum
seekers from voluntary, economic migrants and illegal immigrants. State
sovereignty seems to be challenged by mass asylum seeking and “asylum
shopping”.1
Moreover, since the end of the 1980s, a clear-cut recognition of “genuine” refugees
has disappeared. The collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 ended the ideological
presumption that refugees from Eastern bloc countries must be “genuine” and
acceptable to Western bloc countries, or vice versa. The state, under the situation
prevailing through internal wars and regional conflicts in Kosovo, the former
Yugoslavia and African countries, etc., has had to bear much of the burden of
deciphering “genuine” refugees without resort to clear ideological distinction
between East and West.
Facing such difficulties, the international asylum regime has put much effort into
handling complicated mass asylum seeking. Concerning the principle of nonrefoulement and state sovereignty, in particular, the European Union has
contributed to the development of a regional regime for asylum seekers:
harmonisation of asylum applications; the first state rule; the nearest safe area rule;
and temporary protection (TP) (Joly 2002; Koslowski 1998).
In such post-Cold War circumstances, does the international asylum regime bring
about a change in state legitimacy or an emergence of institutional duality?
2. The State and Its Domestic Limitations
2.1
Weakness of the Asylum Regime
Some weaknesses of the international asylum regime affecting state sovereignty
can be pointed out. First, in the post-Cold War asylum regime, there has been some
convergence in states’ restrictionist and deterrence policies against new asylum
seekers. This trend seems to go against the change in state legitimacy and
institutional duality. Second, the asylum regime system is not at the stage of
implementing strong surveillance and enforcing decision-making. Rather, the
regime has only the “progressive” characteristics to promote domestic
implementation of international human rights norms without full surveillance
procedures (Abe 1998, 20).
1
“Asylum shopping” is defined as abuse of asylum application processes through multiple
applications (Koslowski 1998, 169).
Is State Sovereignty Declining? Asylum Policy in Japan
228
Third, the right of asylum is not the right of the individual to invoke, but only
within the rights of states to grant.2 This originates from the process which created
Article 14(1) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “everyone has the
right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution”. The
alternative term to “enjoy”, “be granted”, was denied by some participating states
(Honma 2001, 19).
Notwithstanding the alluring belief that the international asylum regime changes
state legitimacy or creates institutional duality, the mechanism of the regime
working on the state remains ambiguous (Tarumoto 2002). If asylum policies in
advanced countries could be fully explained by an alternative without referring to
the asylum regime, the regime would be a residual explanatory concept.
Joppke (1998a, 11–12) sets the term “self-limited sovereignty” against the term
“globally limited sovereignty”. While the latter includes the idea of the dominance
of external forces over state sovereignty that the human rights internationalists
emphasise, the former reinforces the idea that human rights limiting state
sovereignty have domestic origins. Further, self-limited sovereignty can be
separated into two types: the legal and the political (see Tarumoto 2002).
2.2
Legal Self-Limitation
Legally self-limited sovereignty is typically based on a constitution that contains
some provisions for the generous treatment of asylum seekers. For example, the
United States Constitution makes no clear distinction between citizens and aliens
and tends to protect the substantive rights of immigrants, including refugees, not
just of citizens. Another example of this type of sovereignty is Germany, where a
unique constitutional right of asylum has long survived, based on Article 16 of the
Basic Law which led to its liberal asylum law. Asylum seekers would be granted
asylum relatively easily, despite an illiberal asylum practice. This type of state
sovereignty may be labelled “constitutional sovereignty”.
It is argued that, independently of the international regimes, such pro-asylum
constitutions are not only a dominant factor but also have a dominant origin
(Joppke 1998b). In the United States, driven by the civil rights movements of the
1960s and by liberal judicial decisions, the asylum policy has moved from foreign
policy considerations towards the practice of universal treatment regardless of
source countries, although it still results in differential treatment of refugees, for
example, from Cuba and Nicaragua and from Haiti, El Salvador and Guatemala
(McBride 1999). In contrast, the German constitutional right of asylum is a selfimposed atonement for the Nazi crimes against humanity, which recognised that
Germany had been the origin of an asylum crisis in Western European countries.
2
One important exception is that the Organization of African Unity adopted the 1969 Convention
Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa, which includes the right to entry
(Sassen 1998, 75).
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Hideki Tarumoto
Undoubtedly, the pro-asylum constitutions do not necessarily continue to show
generosity towards asylum seekers. Facing the outburst of mass asylum seeking
and the abuse of asylum seeking as a rational option to enter and stay legally, the
United States has tended to move to close the gate, coming closer to the Western
European approach. Through a European “harmonisation” of asylum policy,
popular anti-asylum sentiment, and requests for asylum payment cuts by rightist
parties, the 1993 change to the Basic Law deprived Germany of its uniqueness in
asylum policy and witnessed accelerated deportations and a dramatic decline in
asylum claims (Feldblum 1998, 244).
With regard to legally self-limited sovereignty, even if the international asylum
regime has little influence, some favourable domestic resources may bring about a
generous asylum policy.
2.3
Political Self-Limitation
Besides legally self-limited sovereignty, there is another domestic method of
imposing limitation on state sovereignty: politically self-limited sovereignty. If the
state has a constitution without pro-asylum provisions, or if it lacks a constitution,
political agencies will exercise initiative in creating and implementing asylum
policy.
For example, the United Kingdom has no written constitution, no human rights
conventions incorporated in domestic municipal law, and a relatively undeveloped
principle of judicial review. Instead, the parliament possesses the right of initiative
in various policy areas including that of refugees. Such “parliamentary
sovereignty” works with the executive, the Home Office, as the uncontested
authority in asylum policy. The principle of parliamentary sovereignty without
legal-constitutional constraints on the executive has allowed for its zero-sum
immigration policy on the asylum front and has prevented asylum flows from
becoming “more than a trickle” (Joppke 1998a, 1998b).
Parliamentary sovereignty casts doubt on the effectiveness of the international
asylum regime, which seeks to interfere with it. Far from state legitimacy being
challenged and an institutional duality emerging through external forces, domestic
history and institutions such as parliamentary sovereignty and common law remain
the strengths of certain countries. In the case of the United Kingdom, the European
asylum regime put pressure on parliamentary sovereignty through the European
Court. But under parliamentary sovereignty, such external pressure can be
considered as an intolerable intrusion on parliamentary democracy. In addition,
members of parliament as representatives of national electorates must be sensitive
to those of their constituents who hold unfavourable attitudes towards refugees,
thus forging a public-compliant asylum policy. As a result, parliamentary
sovereignty can resist changes in state legitimacy and the emergence of
institutional duality originating from the international asylum regime.
Is State Sovereignty Declining? Asylum Policy in Japan
230
3. Anti-Asylum Attitude of Japan
The cases of self-limited sovereignty in the Western world demonstrate that the
international asylum regime may be a residual factor or at most a secondary factor
in determining asylum policy. However, to explore the mechanism of the regime’s
influence on the state, a new perspective beyond Western frameworks is required.
As a developed Asian country, Japan is a good example of the penetration of
international human rights norms into the domestic sphere from the outside
(Gurowitz 1999; Mukae 2001). Japan has had three main periods of policy
concerning asylum seekers.
3.1
Long Flat Calm
Historically, Japanese state sovereignty was not contravened by the influx of
asylum seekers and the international asylum regime for a relatively long time. Just
after the First World War, refugees from Russia came to the Far East. But, as of the
end of 1937, according to the Bureau of Police and Public Security of the Home
Ministry, only 1,310 Russian refugees had stayed in Japan. Also, a small number of
Jewish refugees who had fled the Nazis reached Japanese territory. Proponents of
asylum protection, such as human rights advocates, sought to apply the principle of
non-extradition of political offenders (NEPO) to asylum seekers who reached
Japanese territory (Honma 2001, 11–14). In addition, Koreans who fled during the
Chedju uprising of 1948 and the Korean War from 1950 to 1953 were not
considered as refugees but as Mikkosha (stowaways). A large number of them were
from Chedju island and did not seek asylum but rather sought to reunite with their
families (Koh 1998, 175–218). Before the end of the 1970s there was no refugee
protection policy in Japan. The Immigration Control Order in 1952, which had no
provision for asylum seekers, remained in effect until its replacement with the
Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act in 1982.
3.2
International Political Pressures
The second characteristic is that Japan was thrown into the international asylum
regime by an external force, that of international political pressure. The antecedent
of the pressure on Japan was another external factor, the influx of “boat people”
from Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia. From the fall of Saigon at the end of March
1975, the exodus of refugees to neighbouring countries had rapidly increased. One
month after the fall, the first Indochinese refugees arrived in Chiba Port. Facing
international political pressure, the Japanese Government, in a cabinet meeting of
April 1978, decided upon a policy to permit the resettlement of a certain number of
Indochinese refugees. But international pressure continued to increase. For
example, the United States called on Japan to accept resettlement of those who
were staying at refugee camps in neighbouring South-East Asian countries. Having
been strained by the influx of Indochinese refugees during the Cold War, the US
Government was concerned about countries that might become a breeding ground
for communism. Japan could not resist such pressures. Through the Japan-US
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Hideki Tarumoto
Summit meeting and the Tokyo Summit meeting in June 1979 and the UN Geneva
Conference on Indochinese refugees in July 1979, Japan finally acceded to the
1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol in October 1981 and January 1982
respectively. Although most Indochinese refugees were not supposed to fall within
the UN Convention definition of refugee, the Japanese ratification of the Refugee
Convention was expected to become a moral testing ground for refugee protection
in Japan. It was not the regime itself but international pressures that induced the
Japanese state to accept the regime and refugees.3
3.3
Singular Bureaucratic Sovereignty
Third, and most importantly, Japan has a type of politically self-limited sovereignty,
because the Japanese Constitution has neither provisions to protect asylum seekers
like those of Germany, nor provisions to extend citizens’ rights to aliens like those
of the United States. In contrast to the strong British Parliament, the Japanese
Parliament (Diet) lacks effective power in immigration policy. Instead, a single
bureaucratic executive decides and implements immigration policies, including
refugee policy. State sovereignty with respect to asylum seekers and the asylum
regime has been embodied solely in the Ministry of Justice. The Immigration
Bureau of the Ministry of Justice is not only in charge of refugee recognition but
also of the system of appeal against rejection. Other ministries, such as the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, have
an interest in various aspects of immigration, but the vertical bureaucratic system
in Japan prevents them from influencing policy-making in immigration.
This allows Japanese asylum policy to be based on “perfectionism”, preventing
“bogus” asylum seekers from being accepted through screening. Compared with
other countries, the number of asylum seekers that Japan has accepted is
remarkably small (Table 1). “Perfectionism” is symbolised by the “60-day rule” in
which asylum applications must be made within 60 days after arrival in Japan.
If an application is delayed beyond 60 days, it will not be considered for the
recognition procedure. Although there is much criticism that the “60-day rule” goes
against the UN Refugee Convention and its principle of non-refoulement, the rule
remains for at least two reasons: after a long-term stay in Japan asylum applicants
are unable to supply the information from their countries of origin needed for
appropriate and fair recognition; and applications made after 60 days are not
considered to be from genuine refugees (Abe 2003, 169–94).
3
The ratification of the regime induced Japan to ensure not only the social rights of refugees but also
of foreign residents generally, including eligibility for participation in national pension and national
health insurance, and entitlement to child allowance, under Article 24 of the Refugee Convention
(Tarumoto 2002).
Is State Sovereignty Declining? Asylum Policy in Japan
232
Table 1. Inflows of Asylum Seekers into Selected OECD Countries (thousands)
1. Including UN Convention refugees as well as Indochinese refugees.
Sources: OECD SOPEMI (2001, 280); Ministry of Justice (2004a); Refugee Assistance Headquarters,
(2004).
It is clear from the above that Japan has retained a singular bureaucratic
sovereignty on refugee issues.
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Hideki Tarumoto
4. A Turning Point in the Anti-Asylum Policy?
4.1
Three Periods in Asylum Granting
The above exploration of asylum policy in Japan does not seem to leave much
room for the impact of the international asylum regime, which, according to human
rights internationalists, must bring about a change in state legitimacy or the
creation of institutional duality.
But, notwithstanding its singular bureaucratic sovereignty, Japanese refugee policy
has undergone a certain transformation, however small. Based on the number of
refugee status grantees, three periods can be distinguished (Table 2): from 1978 to
1988; from 1989 to 1997; from 1998 onwards (see also Ishikawa 2002, 230–32).
In the first period, the number of grantees ranged from three to sixty-seven, which
was not small compared with the earlier Japanese experience. Most of these were
presumed to be Indochinese refugees, who sought to acquire the status of UN
Convention refugees even if they had been granted a resettlement permit as
Indochinese refugees by the Japanese Government.4 It is said that about 80 per cent
of all the grantees in this period were Indochinese refugees (Honma 1990, 151–52).
Note that Japanese acceptance of Indochinese refugees was the result of
international political pressure during the Cold War. The international asylum
regime exerted little influence on the country’s singular bureaucratic sovereignty in
this period.
In the second period from 1989 to 1997, after the Cold War, the number of
grantees decreased significantly. One major reason was that the system of
accepting Indochinese refugees began to reduce the need for them to apply for UN
Convention refugee status. Around the beginning of this second period, the issue
surfaced of illegal immigrants, referred to as “visa overstayers”, who were attracted
by the “bubble economy”. Only one year before the bubble economy collapsed, the
1990 revision of the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act was
enforced, citing control of illegal immigrants as one of its three main purposes.
The appeal system for asylum rejectees came into operation for the first time in
1995 and one rejected applicant was granted refugee status after appealing. Since
1991, some asylum applicants have been granted special residence permits for
humanitarian reasons. But no profound change in the singular bureaucratic
sovereignty of the Ministry of Justice arose from the effects of the international
asylum regime.
4
In Japan, refugees are categorised into three types: Indochinese refugees, UN Convention refugees,
and mandate refugees defined by the UNHCR.
Is State Sovereignty Declining? Asylum Policy in Japan
234
Table 2. Applications for Refugee Status as of 31 December 2003
1. The parentheses show the number of applications granted through the appeal system for asylum
rejectees.
2. Rejectees who received resident status, including change of resident status and renewal of
residential period.
3. As of 31 March 2004.
Sources: Ministry of Justice (2004a); Refugee Assistance Headquarters (2004); Refugee Assistance
Headquarters, personal communication (March 2004).
235
Hideki Tarumoto
The third period began in 1998 when sixteen applicants were granted refugee status,
including one applicant who appealed after initial rejection. Since then, the
Ministry of Justice has granted refugee status to ten or more refugees every year. In
addition, granting of special residence permits for humanitarian reasons increased
in this period. These data on UN Convention refugees may suggest that Japan has
been affected by the international asylum regime.
4.2
The Effect of the Human Rights Regime
Is the Japanese singular bureaucratic sovereignty yielding to the international
asylum regime? Indeed, around 1998 Japan may have been integrated into the
international human rights regime much more deeply than before through its
ratification of a number of conventions concerning human rights, such as the
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women in
1985, the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1994, the International
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination in 1995, and
the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment
or Punishment in 1999.
One possibility is that the international asylum regime, with the penetration of
human rights norms and supported by the influence of the Japanese United Nations
High Commissioner for Refugees of the day, Sadako Ogata, may have had an
impact on the Ministry of Justice’s singular bureaucratic sovereignty. However,
such explanations of the regime fail to consider how it had an impact on Japan’s
asylum policy. Concerning the progress of immigrant rights following international
human rights norms, there are two main paths to consider (Tarumoto 2002): the
political path through NGOs and/or social movements, and the legal path through
the domestic courts.
The most notable event on the political path was the campaign carried out from
March to November 1997 by Amnesty International to improve the asylum
recognition system. But, as Toki (2001, 66–68) argues, it is not clear whether or
not the campaign was effective in improving refugee protection, although it may
have opened the eyes of bureaucrats at the Ministry of Justice towards international
pressures concerning refugees. Likewise, no effect arising from the activities of
other NGOs and civic groups can be confirmed.
The second possible path is through the domestic courts. Around the second period
of asylum granting, there were a considerable number of court cases concerning
refugee recognition. When Tokyo District Court ordered the suspension of an
execution of detention warrant for an asylum applicant on 6 November 2001, the
court made a statement that the Refugee Convention could be considered as a
“superordinate norm” to domestic law, in this case the Immigration Control and
Refugee Recognition Act, and argued that the implementation of the Act against
the Convention “would contravene international order and bring about some
Is State Sovereignty Declining? Asylum Policy in Japan
236
critical effect on public welfare” (Abe 2003, 175). But this type of judgment has
not been common in the Japanese legal sphere (Iwasawa 1998).
4.3
Domestic Political Change and “Transparency”
Through political and legal means, the international human rights regime may
prompt the singular bureaucratic sovereignty of the Ministry of Justice towards
generosity on asylum. But it is unclear whether the regime has any decisive power.
To further explore the mechanism, consider the factor of domestic bureaucracy.
First of all, it should be noted that the number of asylum applications has increased
since 1996. On the one hand, the increase has partly depended on the worsening
situation in countries of origin. In this period, asylum applicants included thirty
Chinese democracy activists in 1996 after the Tiananmen incident, 150 Kurds in
1996 and 1997, and others from Pakistan, Burma, Afghanistan and the Islamic
Republic of Iran in 1999. On the other hand, an internal factor was also responsible
for the increase in asylum applicants. It is said that from around 1997 the Regional
Immigration Bureaus received asylum applications addressing the “60-day rule”
(Ishikawa 2002, 229). The increase of asylum applicants through external and
internal factors may have induced the Ministry of Justice to seek improvements in
the recognition process. These included an induction course for investigators,
increased staff, extended terms of office, and speedier procedures, constituting a
“logic of bureaucracy” whereby bureaucrats wish to avoid being considered as
incompetent. Hence a considerable number of untreated cases prompted such
improvements.
The logic of bureaucracy would not work well without a mechanism for
highlighting refugee issues. One such mechanism is provided by the mass media,
which reported the low number of asylum grantees and the slow process of asylum
recognition in Japan (Ishikawa 2002, 231–32). But the media as such could not
effect much change on policy, because the Japanese public, to whom the mass
media appealed, were not necessarily interested in refugee issues.
Another mechanism was the domestic political setting. At some committees in the
House of Representatives around 1997 and 1998, a member of parliament from the
then governing party, Norito Hosaka, repeatedly questioned why the number of
refugee status grantees was very small, despite the increase in untreated
applications. At the Committee of Judicial Affairs on 28 April 1998, the Minister
of Justice of the day, Kokichi Simoinaba, suggested the introduction of a quick
recognition process and an increase in grantees (Japanese Parliament 2004). But, as
mentioned earlier, the parliament had had little influence on refugee policy before,
so a mechanism to make the ministry sensitive to criticism was required.
At the time, the Japanese political system as a whole was dramatically changing. In
1993 the one-party dominance of the Liberal Democratic Party collapsed, which
resulted in profound changes in various political institutions after 1995, as typically
237
Hideki Tarumoto
demonstrated in financial institutions and policy (Toya 2003). Various political
actors, such as politicians, bureaucrats and employers’ organisations, began to take
domestic and international public opinion into consideration. They could not avoid
“transparency” in various policy processes. The Ministry of Justice, already
sensitive to these issues, was no exception and was forced to change its vested
interests and its way of dealing with refugees. This trend may be further
accelerated by the new generation of younger bureaucrats who are more liberal in
their world view.5
4.4
Status Quo, Pro-Asylum, or Asylum Backlash?
Will the mechanisms working on the bureaucracy push Japanese refugee policy in
a more generous direction in future? A focal point was created in 2002. On 8 May,
five asylum-seeking defectors from the DPR Korea, including a young child,
supported by an NGO, rushed into the compound of the Japanese Consulate
General in Shenyang, China. Chinese police guards ran into the compound and
removed the Koreans, in defiance of the inviolability of foreign consulates and
embassies agreed in the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (The
Japan Times, 16 May 2002).
This Shenyang incident was captured on video and repeatedly broadcast on
television, sparking a diplomatic row between the Japanese and Chinese
governments against the backdrop of lingering Cold War realities on the Korean
peninsula. The then Justice Minister, Mayumi Moriyama, set up a Special
Committee on Refugee Issues under her Private Advisory Group on Immigration
Control Policy (The Japan Times, 25 May 2002). Obviously, avoiding an
international conflict with China, the DPR Korea and the Republic of Korea, and
making gains in Japan’s international reputation in refugee acceptance, were
crucial motives for her setting up the committee. 6 Since its establishment on
11 June 2002, the committee has held meetings and carried out inspections of the
Bureaus at a time when the DPR Korea’s abduction of Japanese nationals was
absorbing public attention. It then submitted an interim report in October 2002, and
a final report in December 2003 to which comments on illegal immigrants, etc.,
were added by the Advisory Group (Ministry of Justice 2004b).
These two reports presented three main proposals: revising the “60-day rule”;
securing the legal status of asylum applicants; and improving the appeal system for
rejectees (Ministry of Justice 2002, 2003). First, partly because the “60-day rule”
has become a major issue in legal cases of refugee non-recognition (Namba 2003),
the reports suggest a change from 60 days to six months or one year. Second, the
applicant in the process should have a legal guarantee against deportation, even if
there is a reason for deportation, and should be given material provisions. Third, at
5
6
Interview with Prof. Yoriko Meguro, a member of the Special Committee on Refugee Issues under
the Private Advisory Group on Immigration Control Policy, 9 April 2004.
Interview with Prof. Yoriko Meguro, who sees international reputation as an important motive,
9 April 2004.
Is State Sovereignty Declining? Asylum Policy in Japan
238
present the General Affairs Division in the Immigration Bureau of the Ministry of
Justice is in charge of refugee recognition, whereas the Adjudication Division in
the same Bureau is responsible for the appeal procedure. The reports suggest that
an advisory group for the minister, composed of third persons with legal
experience, knowledge of law or international affairs, should be created to judge
appeals.
On 4 March 2003, between publication of the two reports, the new Justice Minister,
Daizo Nozawa, submitted to parliament a bill to revise the Immigration Control
and Refugee Recognition Act. When the bill was dropped in October 2003 along
with the winding-up of the House of Representatives (House of Representatives
2003), another bill was resubmitted and debated in the House of Councillors as of
April 2004 (House of Councillors 2004). Although there is some uncertainty, for
example in legal judgments, 7 in the situation of the DPR Korea, 8 in the harsh
practice of immigration officers, 9 and a campaign by the Ministry of Justice to
crack down on illegal immigrants,10 passing the bill would lead to improvements in
Japanese asylum policy even if it went against singular bureaucratic sovereignty.
5. Conclusion
Lacking a domestic source for human rights, Japan is a good example from which
to explore the impact of the international human rights regime on domestic policies
concerning human rights. Although both countries were defeated in the Second
World War, Germany included asylum provisions in its constitution as a kind of
war apology, whereas Japan missed an opportunity to incorporate domestic
provisions for asylum. Without a pro-asylum constitution like those of the United
States and Germany, and given the lack of a strong parliament like that of the
United Kingdom, Japan has acquired under its Ministry of Justice a singular
bureaucratic sovereignty with regard to asylum policy.
7
A democracy activist from Myanmar who had lived in Japan for more than a decade with his family
had been ordered to leave after his asylum application was refused, but finally he was granted a
special residence permit for humanitarian reasons (The Japan Times, 17 January 2004). The
Nagoya District Court also granted refugee status to a Kurdish man with Turkish citizenship. This
was the second time that a court had reversed a government decision to reject an application for
refugee status (The Japan Times, 16 April 2004).
8
If an influx of refugees from the DPR Korea took place, anti-asylum sentiment would rise to
prevent improvements in the asylum policy.
9
When an Afghan asylum seeker suffering depression and post-traumatic stress disorder tried to kill
himself while being moved from hospital to a detention facility, officers took him to hospital for
treatment of a knife wound. After a three-hour operation, however, they immediately transferred
him to the detention facility (The Japan Times, 27 March 2004).
10
Since 16 February 2004, the Immigration Bureau of the Ministry of Justice has collected
information on illegal overstayers through its website, which has given rise to criticism by NGOs.
In addition, the Bureau ran a special campaign to crack down on illegal immigrant workers in June
2004, eliciting cooperation from other ministries, local councils, employers’ organisations and
other concerned bodies, and distributing leaflets on illegal workers among those concerned and
foreigners in Japan and abroad (Ministry of Justice 2004c).
239
Hideki Tarumoto
Like changes in citizenship policy for immigrants and aliens (Tarumoto 2003), the
case of Indochinese refugees and Japan’s ratification of the Refugee Convention
and its Protocol demonstrate that international political pressures based on interstate relations have been strongly effective on asylum policy in Japan.
It may be argued that the increase in refugee status grantees around 1998 makes a
case for the effectiveness of the international asylum regime. However that effect,
if any, is far from being a change in state legitimacy or the establishment of
institutional duality arising from human rights norms. It certainly appears that the
Japanese singular bureaucratic sovereignty is yielding to, and fitting in with, the
asylum regime. But it is not easy to confirm that such change has been due to the
regime. Rather, it is clear that the domestic political process, undergoing changes
stemming from the political system and requests for “transparency” in policy
processes, has opened the way to changing the asylum policy and handling interstate relations with neighbouring countries.
This suggests that the domestic consequences of the impact of international
regimes constitute a useful basis for exploring sovereignty decline in other
countries.
Note
* I am indebted to the guest-editor, Prof. Christine Inglis, and to an anonymous
referee for comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank Prof. Yoriko
Meguro for supplying information and comments. Part of the Grants-in-Aid for
Scientific Research (grants from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports,
Science and Technology, and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, to
Prof. Kazuo Seiyama, Prof. Naoki Sudo and myself) and funding from the Japan
Economic Research Foundation were used to research this article.
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Hideki Tarumoto is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Graduate School of
Letters, Hokkaido University, Japan. His research is concerned with citizenship
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Is State Sovereignty Declining? Asylum Policy in Japan
242
publications include Change and Continuity of Ethnic Dualism: Ethnic
Stratification in 1970s Britain (1996); Is Post-National Citizenship a “Normal”
Model?: An Exploration from the Viewpoint of “Transcendental Choice of
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“Multiculturalism in Japan: citizenship policy for immigrants” (2003); email:
taru@let.hokudai.ac.jp
Will Migrant Remittances Continue Through
Time? A New Answer to an Old Question
ELIZABETH M. GRIECO
Office of Immigration Statistics
U.S. Department of Homeland Security
Washington, D.C.
This paper analyses the influence of continued migration and network
participation on migrant household remittance behaviour. The “remittance
decay” hypothesis suggests that the amount of remittances sent by migrants
to their countries of origin declines through time. However, empirical studies
have found that the passage of time does not significantly influence migrant
remittance behaviour and that remittances are maintained at high levels over
long periods. If remittances do not decline, as suggested by remittance theory,
why do they continue through time, as suggested by empirical research? This
paper uses network theory and the concepts of social capital and social ties
to build an analytical framework to answer this question. Remittances are not
simply sent but exchanged for resources accessible through the maintenance
of relationships with other network members. Instead of asking what
motivates migrants to remit, this paper focuses on those factors that influence
the continued existence of migrant/non-migrant relationships in which
remittances are exchanged. Family reunification is the underlying social
process that determines household remittance behaviour. Increasing,
continuing, or declining remittance levels simply reflect the process of
household reconstitution abroad. Thus, as families reunite in the new
homeland, less money is sent back to the country of origin. In addition,
participation by households in migrant networks positively influences
remittance behaviour.
S
ince the 1970s, remittances from migrants to Australia, New Zealand and the
United States have played a growing and important role in the economies of
Pacific Island countries. Migrant remittances provide capital-poor countries with
foreign exchange, ease balance of payments problems, encourage industrial
development by facilitating the import of capital goods and raw materials, and
contribute to employment (Russell 1986; Menjivar et al. 1998). In many Pacific
Island countries, including Tonga, Western Samoa and the Cook Islands,
remittances represent an important component of total national incomes. For
example, in the early 1980s, remittances contributed between 35 per cent and
40 per cent of the total Cook Islands’ income (Connell 1980). Similarly in 1989,
remittances represented approximately 60 per cent of the Tongan and 35 per cent
International Journal on Multicultural Societies (IJMS), Vol. 6, No. 2, 2004:243- 252
ISSN 1817-4574, www.unesco.org/shs/ijms/vol6/issue2/art3 © UNESCO
Will Migrant Remittances Continue Through Time?
244
of the Western Samoan gross domestic product (Appleyard and Stahl 1995).
Remittances can also benefit individual recipients by raising and maintaining living
standards and reducing the gap between higher-income and lower-income groups
(Menjivar et al. 1998; Russell 1986). There is also evidence from many Pacific
Island countries that remittances form a significant part of disposable household
income (Connell 1980; Appleyard and Stahl 1995). A national income and
expenditure survey in Tonga, for example, showed that 90 per cent of the
households received remittances and that remittances constituted an average of
28 per cent of household income (Ahlburg and Brown 1998).
Because of the importance of remittances to Pacific Island economies – and to
economies of migrant-sending countries around the world – policy-makers are
concerned with the long-term sustainability of these flows. Migrant remittance
theory, however, predicts that the level of remittances sent by migrants will decline
through time. Traditionally, researchers have relied on the “remittance decay”
hypothesis as modelled by Stark (1978) to analyse remittance behaviour. Stark
suggests that individual remittances will peak soon after arrival and then decline,
increasing occasionally in response to specific events or needs by relatives in the
home country. Initially, remittances are low but increase with time as migrants
adjusts to their new environment and are relieved of the initial costs associated
with moving. Eventually, remittances will cease, increasing again only if the
migrant decides to return home permanently. The concept of altruism is central to
Stark’s theory of remittance decay. In the remittance literature, altruism is
generally defined as the concern migrants have for their non-migrant family
members in their countries of origin. Stark attributes the decline in remittance
behaviour through time to the waning of altruism. As the migrants’ commitment
and attachment to their families and home areas weaken through time, remittances
decline.
Although research on remittance decay is limited, much of it fails to support
Stark’s (1978) hypothesis. This is especially true when considering research on
remittances in the Pacific. For example, research on the remittance behaviour of
Tongans and Cook Islanders in Australia and New Zealand found that the amount
of money sent by recent migrants was similar to that remitted by migrants who had
arrived fifteen to twenty years earlier (Loomis 1990; Tongamoa 1987; Vete 1995).
Also, research on the remittance behaviour of Fijians in Australia suggests that
length of residency abroad does not substantially affect remittance flows (Stanwix
and Connell 1995). While the results of these studies are troubled by small sample
sizes and rudimentary statistical techniques, a study by Brown (1998) using an
advanced statistical method (Tobit regression) and controls for a number of
“supply” and “demand” side variables leads to much the same conclusion. Brown
found that the passage of time did not have a significant effect on the remittance
behaviour of Tongans and Western Samoans in Australia.
245
Elizabeth M. Grieco
1. Remittance Decay – or Duration?
The lack of support exhibited by the results of empirical research for remittance
theory raises an interesting question: If remittances do not decline, as suggested by
the remittance decay hypothesis, why do they continue through time, as suggested
by the results of research on Pacific Island migrant populations? And if it is true
that altruism, as a motive for remitting, wanes through time, what causes the
commitment to remit to be sustained?
In this paper, I use migrant network theory and the concepts of social capital and
the strength of social ties to develop an alternative sociological framework to help
to answer these questions (Grieco 2003). This approach suggests alternative
explanations of what remittances are, why they occur, and why they decay – or
endure – through time. Remittances in this analysis are not defined as the byproduct of the altruism migrants feel for their family. Rather, they are the resources
exchanged between members of a migrant social network. Remittances occur as the
result of migrants’ participation in these networks and represent the migrants’
effort to build and maintain social capital. Social capital refers to the ability of
individuals to obtain resources through their continued relationships with other
network members (Portes 1995, 1998). Within these networks, both migrants and
non-migrants act as donors and recipients of social capital, making their resources
available to network members while simultaneously accessing the resources of
others. Remittances are not simply “sent” by the migrant to family members back
home but are exchanged for resources accessible through the maintenance of
relationships with other members of a given social network.
In the remittance literature, it is generally assumed that migrants are directly
motivated to remit by, for example, their feelings of altruism for family members
or their own self-interest. However, viewing remittances as part of a migrant’s
effort to build and maintain social capital makes the link between the occurrence of
remittances and the motivation to remit less direct. Remittances occur because the
migrant has established and is maintaining a relationship with another member of a
social network. In other words, relationships come first and the motivation to remit
comes after, not the other way around. Without relationships, there would be no
remittances. When viewing remittance behaviour through the lens of social capital
and migrant network theory, the influence of time becomes less direct. Instead of
asking what motivates the migrant to remit, the question becomes: What enables
migrants to maintain the relationships in which remittances are exchanged?
2. Strong Kin Ties, Family Reunification Migration, and Remittance
Decay
Recognising the social basis on which remittance behaviour is based is
fundamental to understanding why remittances endure or decay through time.
Will Migrant Remittances Continue Through Time?
246
According to remittance research, the majority of the migrant/non-migrant
relationships in which remittances are exchanged are immediate kin ties, including
spouses, children, parents and siblings. Because strong kin ties form the basis of
remittance behaviour, remittances will continue as long as those relationships are
maintained through time. Remittance decay reflects the gradual change and ending
of those ties maintained by household members with immediate kin in the country
of origin.
The migration process, specifically family reunification migration, is the
underlying social process that determines the remittance behaviour of migrant
households. Research shows a negative association between the point in time the
household received its last migrant member and the probability of remitting
(Grieco 2003). This suggests that households in the middle of the family
reunification process are the most active remitters. The results also indicate that
households with a history of family reunification are more likely to remit. Thus
family reunification appears to have a positive influence on remittance behaviour.
Combined with the results of qualitative research on the remittance behaviour of
Pacific Island migrants, these results suggest a possible reason why remittances rise
and decay through time. Remittance levels increase as the migrant household
works to support dependent family members in the country of origin and to assist
in their eventual emigration. As the process of family reunification is gradually
completed, fewer and fewer immediate kin remain abroad and remittance levels
begin to decline. When the last migrant joins the household and all the dependent
family members have joined the earliest migrant, the flow of remittances sent back
home ends. Thus, the time path for remittance behaviour is largely driven by the
process of family reunification.
3. Migrant Network Theory and Remittance Duration
The influence of the migration process not only explains why remittances decline,
but why they continue through time. Households will continue remitting as long as
their migrant members have dependent relatives in other countries. Migrant
network theory suggests a second way in which remittance behaviour is maintained
through time. The active and continued participation by household members in
migrant networks helps to promote remittance behaviour by maintaining the
relationships between migrants and non-migrants. Migrant networks are sets of
interpersonal ties that connect migrants, former migrants and non-migrants in
origin and destination countries through ties of kinship, friendship and shared
national origins. Networks reduce the costs and disruptions of migration, maintain
links between sending and receiving communities, serve as channels for
information and resources, and influence the rate of adaptation and assimilation to
the destination society (Massey et al. 1987).
Migrant networks serve many important functions for their migrant members.
However, when considering the influence that migrant network participation has on
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Elizabeth M. Grieco
household remittance behaviour, the most important of these functions is the
influence that migrant networks have on the rate of adaptation and assimilation of
their members to the destination society. Migrant networks can actually retard
integration by maximising links with and orientation towards the society of origin.
This, in turn, should help to maintain the relationships between migrants and nonmigrants. This occurs in at least three ways. First, while migrant networks provide
short-term adaptive assistance to recent migrants that can facilitate integration,
such as finding housing, arranging employment and providing emotional support,
they can also insulate migrants from the destination society. Migrant networks
strengthen the links migrants have to their sending society while effectively
limiting contacts with the broader destination community (Gurak and Caces 1992).
Heavy reliance on migrant networks for support means that ties with other coethnics dominate the immediate social networks of new migrants. This
simultaneously maximises the number and strength of ties with members of the
origin society while minimising the number and need for ties with members of the
receiving society.
Second, kin groups tend to be the dominant social organisations present in migrant
networks and often represent the link between non-migrants in the country of
origin and migrants in the country of destination that encourages continued
migration through time (Boyd 1989; Gurak and Caces 1992; Massey et al. 1993).
By guaranteeing that the social network of new migrants will be dominated by ties
with relatives, migration under the auspices of kinship promotes the continuing
intense involvement in kin groups (Tilly and Brown 1967; Gurak and Caces 1992).
This reinforces the strength of ties to members of the origin society and slows the
establishment of ties with members of the destination society, retarding integration
and assimilation.
Finally, migrant networks can encourage the interdependence of network members
in the country of destination that can lead, through time, to the establishment of
migrant communities and the re-establishment of behavioural norms based on the
culture of the community of origin (Grieco 1998). The participation in the wider
migrant community provides migrants with culturally acceptable venues where
additional ties to co-ethnics outside their immediate kin networks can be
established and maintained. Also, participation in activities sponsored by the
migrant community, such as ethnic organisations, sports associations, festivals and
ceremonies, not only provide venues for networking but also create “lacunae” in
the wider host society where the migrants’ cultural and behavioural norms can be
both celebrated and reaffirmed. This helps to strengthen and maintain the migrants’
orientation to their origin society.
In these three ways, the continued participation by migrants in migrant networks
maintains the bonds between migrants and non-migrants and encourages a
continued orientation to the culture and society of origin. This reduces the
migrants’ rate of adaptation and assimilation to the destination society and, in turn,
helps to maintain remittance levels through time. Because the relationships
Will Migrant Remittances Continue Through Time?
248
between migrants and non-migrants form the social basis of remittance behaviour,
the fact that the continued participation in migrant network encourages migrants to
renew and maintain their relationships with non-migrants suggests that it will also
help to maintain remittance levels through time. The cultural orientation
engendered by migrant network participation should also have a positive influence
on remittance behaviour. Because migrant networks link migrants to their origin
cultures, the same social sanctions that discourage reneging on commitments back
home will have been transplanted into the migrant communities abroad. This
cultural “pressure” will be reinforced by the interpersonal relationships established
with other co-ethnics, which will act as constant reminders to the migrants of their
cultural obligations and duties to their families back home. This will encourage
migrants who are active network members to maintain their relationships abroad
and continue remitting.
4. The Sociological Approach to Remittance Behaviour
A sociological approach to remittance behaviour, as outlined here, focuses on the
relationships that exist between migrants and non-migrants. These relationships are
of paramount importance because they form the social basis of remittance
behaviour. Their continued existence helps to explain what remittances are, why
migrants remit, and why remittance behaviour continues through time. Remittances
are the resources exchanged between the migrant and non-migrant members of
migrant social networks. They occur as the result of migrants’ participation in
those networks and represent their efforts to build and maintain social capital.
Remittances are not simply “sent” by migrants to non-migrants. Rather, they are
exchanged for resources accessible through the maintenance of relationships with
other network members. Migrants will continue to remit as long as the
relationships in which remittances are exchanged are maintained. By focusing on
the relationships between migrants and non-migrants, the sociological approach
also helps to explain why remittances decline through time. Remittance behaviour
declines and eventually ends largely because the relationships between migrants
and non-migrants have substantially altered or have ceased to exist. For example,
the economic independence of non-migrants in the country of origin, such as the
marriage of a daughter or sister, would alter the migrant/non-migrant relationship
and would end the need for remittances from migrants. Also, the migration of nonmigrants to join migrants abroad would end the remittance relationship and
remittance behaviour. The death of non-migrants would also end this relationship.
By explaining why remittances continue through time as well as why they end, the
sociological approach helps to explain remittance behaviour in general and not just
a single aspect, such as remittance decay. However, because of the importance of
remittances to many labour-exporting countries, it is understandable why
researchers and policy-makers have been most concerned with remittance decay,
especially determining those factors that positively influence aggregate remittance
levels through time. This concern with aggregate remittance levels has had two
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Elizabeth M. Grieco
unfortunate side effects for remittance research. First, it has encouraged researchers
to focus on remittances as a resource (i.e. simply as money or goods) rather than
the product of the migrant/non-migrant relationship. By focusing on the outcome of
remittance behaviour, researchers have placed greater emphasis on determining
those factors that influence the remittance event (i.e. the exchange of remittances)
rather than the social context in which the event occurs. In other words, they are
trying to determine factors that influence the “effect” without first considering the
“cause” of the outcome.
Second, the emphasis on explaining aggregate remittance levels has placed little
pressure on researchers to clarify the causes of remittance behaviour. Stark’s view
of altruism (1978; see also Lucas and Stark 1985; Stark and Lucas 1988), i.e. the
concern migrants have for the well-being of their non-migrant family members,
seems to be generally accepted by researchers as the root cause of remittance
behaviour. Stark’s work is almost universally cited and few alternatives to the
theory of altruism and remittance decay have been proposed. According to Stark,
as the altruism migrants have for their kin back home weakens, both the incidence
and amount of remittances will decline through time. However, Stark never
clarifies why this is so. Because of the importance of aggregate remittances to
many labour-exporting economies, this lack of theoretical development is
understandable. The theoretical cause of remittance behaviour is far less important
than ascertaining the determinants of that behaviour which, if encouraged or
facilitated, could help to maintain high remittance levels through time.
By placing emphasis on remittances as a resource and failing to clarify the causal
process, it is unsurprising that the research literature has generated conflicting
results regarding the association between time and remittance behaviour. In
comparison, the sociological approach focuses on the migrant/non-migrant
relationship in which remittances are exchanged. It is the existence of these
relationships that helps to explain why remittances exist, why they continue
through time, and why they end. In this sense, the sociological approach “backs up
the causal chain” and incorporates the cause (i.e. migrant/non-migrant relationship),
the event (i.e. exchange of remittances) and the effect (i.e. amount and frequency)
of remittance behaviour into a single framework.
5. Implications for Aggregate Remittance Flows
If family reunification and the establishment of migrant households abroad leads to
a diminishing and eventual end of remittances sent back to the country of origin,
what are some of the implications of this process for aggregate remittance flows
through time? There are three factors to consider. First, high levels of remittances
are not inevitable with every migration flow established because both the level and
continuity of remittances are strongly influenced by the characteristics of those
flows. If a migrant population is established through the process of family
migration, for example, where entire family units migrate, it is probable that this
Will Migrant Remittances Continue Through Time?
250
population will exhibit low aggregate remittance levels and a short period of
remittance activity. Fiji Indian migration tends to be dominated by family units,
which may help to explain their reported low remittance rates (Raj 1991). In
comparison, if a migrant population is established through family reunification or
“chain” migration, where one or a few family members migrate and are followed
by others at a later date, it is likely that this population will exhibit higher
aggregate remittance levels and a longer period of remittance activity. This may
help to explain why the remittance levels of Cook Island, Samoan and Tongan
migrants in Australia and New Zealand – populations that have been established
through chain migration – have been found to remain high over an extended period
of time (Curson 1979; James 1991; Loomis 1990; MacPherson 1994; Vete 1995).
Migrant populations favouring temporary or “circular” migration, where one or a
few family members move for short periods back and forth between their home and
destination countries, would probably also exhibit higher aggregate remittance
levels and longer periods of remittance activity, as seen among the Mexican
immigrants to the United States.
Second, there is no guarantee that aggregate remittance flows will remain stable
and continue over the long term. Remittances will remain high as long as migrants
continue to establish household extensions in the country of destination. This
means that the stability and continuity of aggregate remittance flows is linked to
two interrelated processes: (a) the constant inflow of migrants from sending
countries into receiving countries, which would provide a steady flow of newly
established households; and (b) the dominance of “chain” migration, where
migrant and non-migrant family members are separated for the time it takes
migrant households to reconstitute in another country. These processes can be
influenced by policies enacted by both the sending and receiving countries to the
detriment – or benefit – of long-term aggregate remittance flows. Aggregate
remittances could be significantly altered, for example, if the receiving country
enacted policies that curtailed the number of new immigrant arrivals or expelled
resident immigrants. Conversely, by encouraging family reunification migration,
governments may inadvertently support the continuity of remittance flows. This
was clearly seen among the Cook Island, Samoan and Tongan migrant populations
in Australia and New Zealand. Initially established through chain and household
reconstitution migration, this process was galvanised by the pro-immigrant and
family reunification policies of the New Zealand and Australian governments in
the 1990s. Combined, these policies buoyed the remittance behaviour of these
communities through time. However, migrants are not without agency, and their
behaviour, characteristics and goals – on a collective scale – also have an effect.
For example, migrants may choose to enter a country illegally, thereby maintaining
a constant inflow in spite of strict immigration laws. Poor migrant households with
minimal resources may be forced to remain separated, thus slowing the pace of
family reunification and maintaining the need for remittances through time. For
some households, the ultimate goal may not be permanent settlement but circular
migration, which would probably increase the stability and continuity of aggregate
remittances through time.
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Elizabeth M. Grieco
Finally, given the social basis on which remittance behaviour is based – that is,
strong kin ties – it is highly unlikely that this behaviour will be continued by the
children or grandchildren of immigrants. The reason is simple: immediate kin,
including parents, spouses, children and siblings, are the most likely of all social
ties to exchange financial resources, such as remittances. The second- and thirdgeneration (and even many of the “1.5 generation” who immigrated as children)
would have most or all of their strong ties in the country of destination. It is not
likely that the children of immigrants would be willing to directly support distant,
often unknown relatives in an ancestral origin country whose weak social ties lack
a financial exchange component.
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About the Author
Elizabeth M. Grieco, Ph.D., is a statistician/demographer with the Office of
Immigration Statistics, Department of Homeland Security, in Washington, D.C.,
United States; email: Elizabeth.M.Grieco@dhs.gov.
Theorising Return Migration:
The Conceptual Approach to Return Migrants
Revisited
JEAN-PIERRE CASSARINO*
European University Institute, Florence
The attention paid by international organisations to the link between
migration and development in migrants’ origin countries has
highlighted the need to revisit approaches to return migration.
Moreover, the growing diversity of migratory categories (ranging
from economic migrants to refugees and asylum seekers) necessitates
a distinction between the various types of returnee. We still need to
know who returns when, and why; and why some returnees appear as
actors of change, in specific social and institutional circumstances at
home, whereas others do not. The first objective of this paper is to
analyse how return has been dealt with by international migration
theories, emphasising particularly the assumptions on which they rest.
This theoretical overview is necessary to show how return has been
defined and located in time and space, and how the returnee has been
depicted. The second objective is to take the various approaches to
return migration a step further by elaborating on the theoretical
insights that have been extensively proposed. The conceptual
approach to returnees is then revisited, taking into account a set of
distinguishing criteria, i.e. the returnee’s “preparedness” and
“resource mobilisation”.
A
s a subprocess of international migration, return migration has been subject
to various approaches that offer contrasting sets of propositions stemming
from neoclassical economics, the new economics of labour migration, structuralism,
transnationalism and social network theory. From a qualitative point of view,
numerous empirical inquiries have been carried out to better illustrate the
multifarious factors that have made return migration a multifaceted and
heterogeneous phenomenon. Although return migration has long been subject to
various interpretations, our understanding of it remains hazy. Not so much because
it has been neglected by migration scholars – analyses of return migration have in
fact been legion since the 1960s – but rather because its magnitude and
configuration are scarcely measurable and comparable, owing to the lack of
reliable large-scale quantitative data.
International Journal on Multicultural Societies (IJMS), Vol. 6, No. 2, 2004: 253 -279
ISSN 1817-4574, www.unesco.org/shs/ijms/vol6/issue2/art4 © UNESCO
Theorising Return Migration
254
Today, the attention paid by international organisations to the link between
migration and development has highlighted the need to revisit approaches to return
migration. Moreover, the growing diversity of migration categories (ranging from
economic migrants to refugees and asylum seekers) necessitates a distinction
between the various types of returnee. We still need to know who returns when,
and why; and why some returnees appear as actors of change, in specific social and
institutional circumstances at home, whereas others do not.
As a prerequisite to revisiting the conceptual approach to the profiles of returnees,
by taking into account a set of distinguishing criteria, the first objective of this
paper is to analyse how return has been dealt with by international migration
theories, emphasising particularly the assumptions on which they rest. This
theoretical overview is necessary to show how return has been defined and located
in time and space, and how the returnee has been depicted.
The second objective is to take the various approaches to return migration a step
further by using and elaborating on the theoretical insights that have been
extensively proposed. The conceptual approach to returnees is then revisited
through a set of distinguishing criteria, i.e. the returnee’s “preparedness” and
“resource mobilisation”. These criteria are subject to examination in the
development of this study.
1. Theoretical Overview of Return Migration
While scholarly approaches related to return migration can be traced back to the
1960s, there is no question that, with hindsight, it was in the 1980s that stimulating
scientific debate among scholars took place on the return phenomenon and its
impact on origin countries. These debates culminated in the production of several
volumes and critical essays, and in the organisation of conferences (Kubat 1984;
Council of Europe 1987). Moreover, they contributed intensively to the
development of the literature on return migration, together with the growing
concern over “co-development”, the “voluntary repatriation of third-country
nationals”, the emergence and implementation of bilateral readmission agreements
between sending and receiving countries, and the link between international
migration and economic development in migrants’ origin countries.
It has to be said that the increasing variety of scholarly analyses, together with the
resilient politicisation of international migration movements, have been incidental
to the ways in which return migration and returnees have been understood and
analysed. Oddly enough, just as Mary Kritz noted (1987, 948), there exist
conceptual problems regarding the definitions of the immigrant – such definitions
having a bearing on the formulation of national immigration policies – there also
exist several definitional approaches to return migration, and to returnees that are
playing a crucial role in orienting, if not shaping, the perceptions, taxonomies and
policies adopted by governmental and intergovernmental agencies.
255
Jean-Pierre Cassarino
As a prerequisite to exploring how return has been addressed by international
migration theorists, it is important to stress that the theoretical insights discussed
below have, in various degrees, included return migration as a subcomponent of
their analytical approaches. Whereas some of these insights are the outcome of
empirical studies, others stem from the collection of fragmented official
quantitative data, based on given definitional criteria of the returnee.
This critical review focuses exclusively on theories that have attempted to propose
a set of variables aimed at better understanding the magnitude and dynamics of
return migration to origin countries. Whatever their views and interpretations, all
the theories presented below yield valuable insights. They do so in so far as they
differ in terms of level of analysis and with respect to the salience of the issue of
return in their respective analytical frameworks.
1.1. Neoclassical Economics and the New Economics of Labour Migration
In so far as the neoclassical approach to international migration is based on the
notion of wage differentials between receiving and sending areas, as well as on the
migrant’s expectations for higher earnings in host countries (Todaro 1969, 140),
return migration seems to be viewed as the outcome of a failed migration
experience which did not yield the expected benefits. In other words, in a
neoclassical stance, return migration exclusively involves labour migrants who
miscalculated the costs of migration and who did not reap the benefits of higher
earnings. Return occurs as a consequence of their failed experiences abroad or
because their human capital was not rewarded as expected. Furthermore, unlike the
new economics of labour migration (NELM, see below), the neoclassical
economics of migration views migrants as individuals who maximise not only their
earnings but also the duration of their stay abroad to achieve permanent settlement
and family reunification. In this framework of analysis, return cannot but be
motivated by a failed migration experience, in terms of expected earnings,
employment and duration.
Conversely, while the neoclassical approach to return migration argues that
migrants did not successfully maximise their expected earnings, NELM views
return migration as the logical outcome of a “calculated strategy”, defined at the
level of the migrant’s household, and resulting from the successful achievement of
goals or target. In fact, as Oded Stark’s seminal book argues, the NELM approach
“shifts the focus of migration theory from individual independence … to mutual
interdependence” (Stark 1991, 26), i.e. at the level of the family or the household.
Moreover, it views return as the natural outcome of a successful experience abroad
during which migrants met their goals (i.e. higher incomes and accumulation of
savings) while naturally remitting part of their income to the household.
Remittances are part and parcel of a strategy aimed at diversifying the resources of
the household with a view to better compensating for the risks, linked to the
absence of an efficient insurance market in home countries. They also constitute
Theorising Return Migration
256
one explanatory factor in the return decision, together with the attachment to the
home country.
With reference to remittances and the likelihood of return, Amelie Constant and
Douglas Massey, by analysing data relating to the return migration of guestworkers in Germany from 1984 to 1997, observed that remitters have higher rates
of employment in receiving countries and that having a spouse in the home country
increases their likelihood of return (Constant and Massey 2002, 27–8). In contrast
to the neoclassical model, return migration appears to Oded Stark and his followers
(Taylor 1996) as being part of a well-prepared migration project which shapes not
only the propensity of migrants to “exert a higher level of work effort [in receiving
countries] than that exerted by native-born workers” (Stark 1991, 392) and to save
more money than native-born workers (Stark and Galor 1990), but also their level
of socialisation in receiving countries as well as their incentives to gain additional
skills or on-the-job training. In other words, skills acquired abroad are viewed as
being affected by the probability of return. In fact, according to NELM, migrants
go abroad for a limited period of time, until they succeed in providing their
households with the liquidity and income they expect to earn. The planning of the
migration project has a bearing on the behavioural patterns of the migrant in the
host society, as well as on professional advancement.
The neoclassical economics and NELM approaches differ in so far as they posit
contrasting sets of interpretations regarding return migration. When neoclassical
economists argue that people move permanently to raise and maximise their wages
in receiving countries, return migration is viewed as a failure, if not an anomaly.
When NELM contends that people move on a temporary basis to achieve their
goals or targets in receiving countries, as a prerequisite to returning home, return
migration is viewed as a success story, if not a logical outcome. NELM theorists
are adamant about breaking away from the neoclassical image of the failed returnee.
The duration of stay abroad is calculated with reference to the needs of the
household, in terms of insurance, purchasing power and savings. Once such needs
are fulfilled, return migration occurs. In other words, the NELM approach to return
migration goes “beyond a response to negative wage differential” (Stark 1996, 11).
There is no question that, despite their contrasting interpretations of return
migration, both theoretical schemes give valuable insights regarding the reasons for
which people move abroad and return home. Migrants have clearly defined projects
or strategies before, during and after their migration experiences. In fact, the
above-mentioned “calculated strategy” is for NELM a way of stressing the fact that
the migration decision can no longer be viewed “as an act of desperation or
boundless optimism” (Stark 1996, 26). Whether they are faced with market failures
at home or with the need to compensate for wage differentials between their
countries of origin and their areas of destination, migrants plan and try to respond
to market uncertainties.
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Nonetheless, as far as their analytical frameworks are concerned, both theoretical
approaches have several shortcomings. The first relates to the actors themselves
and their motivations for return. These seem to be determined by financial or
economic factors only, while providing little explanation of how remittances and
skills are used in home countries. The second pertains to the fact that returnees are
exclusively viewed as foreign-income bearers or “financial intermediaries”, as
Edward Taylor would put it. Moreover, while neoclassical economics and NELM
try to explain when and why the decision to return home takes place, there is
virtually no reference to where migrants return. As no reference is made to their
social, economic and political environment at home, return experiences seem
isolated from each other. Not only do we not understand how the strategies are
planned and reshaped when return takes place, but the interaction beyond the
returnee’s family or household remains unaccounted for. Finally, as shown in the
following section, several empirical studies have convincingly demonstrated that
the success/failure paradigm cannot fully explain the return migration phenomenon.
This paradigm tends in fact to isolate the decisions and strategies of the returnees
from their social and political environment, without correlating them with
contextual factors at home.
As the structural approach to return migration contends, return is not only a
personal issue, but above all a social and contextual one, affected by situational
and structural factors.
1.2. The Structural Approach to Return Migration
There is no surprise in mentioning that the empirical findings and theoretical
insights produced by anthropologists, sociologists and social geographers have
contributed greatly to refining the structural approach to return migration.
This structural approach argues that return is not solely analysed with reference to
the individual experience of the migrant, but also with reference to social and
institutional factors in countries of origin. In fact, return is also a question of
context.
Just like NELM, the structural approach to return migration shows how crucial to
the return decision and the reintegration of the migrant are the financial and
economic resources brought back to origin countries. Returnees’ success or failure
is analysed by correlating the “reality” of the home economy and society with the
expectations of the returnee. Francesco Cerase’s influential article on Italian
returnees from the United States provides many emblematic examples of how
complex the relationships between the returnee’s expectations and the social and
economic context (i.e. “reality”) at home are. Cerase identifies four different types
of returnee, emphasising their aspirations, expectations and needs:
•
“Return of failure” pertains to those returnees who could not integrate in their
host countries owing to the prejudices and stereotypes they encountered abroad.
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Their difficulties in taking an active part in the receiving societies or in
adapting themselves to host societies were strong enough to motivate their
return.
•
“Return of conservatism” includes migrants who before emigrating had
planned to return home with enough money to buy land with a view to
“liberating themselves from loathsome subjection to the landowners” (Cerase
1974, 254). Because of these aspirations and strategies, conservative returnees
only tend to satisfy their personal needs, as well as those of their relatives.
Conservative returnees do not aim at changing the social context they had left
before migrating; rather, they help to preserve it.
•
“Return of retirement” refers to retired migrants who decide to return to their
home countries and to acquire a piece of land and a home where they will
spend their old age.
•
“Return of innovation” is no doubt the most dynamic category of returnees in
Cerase’s typology. It refers to actors who are “prepared to make use of all the
means and new skills they have acquired during their migratory experiences”
(Cerase 1974, 251) with a view to achieving their goals in their origin countries,
which, according to them, offer greater opportunities to satisfy their
expectations. Cerase notes that these returnees view themselves as innovators,
for they believe that the skills acquired abroad as well as their savings will
have turned them into “carriers of change”. Nonetheless, Cerase observes that
these returnees are unlikely to be actors of change in their home countries
because of the resilience of strong power relations and vested interests which
prevent innovators from undertaking any initiatives that could jeopardise the
established situation and the traditional power structure.
Cerase’s typology of returnees clearly constitutes an attempt to show that
situational or contextual factors in origin countries need to be taken into account as
a prerequisite to determining whether a return experience is a success or a failure.
There is no question that Cerase’s observations have been crucial to subsequent
approaches to returnees and return migration issues. In fact, a few years later, a
study by George Gmelch elaborated on Cerase’s typology while stressing the need
to correlate the migrants’ intentions to return with their motivations for return.
Intentions to return, whether real or intended, shape the returnees’ expectations in
origin countries (Rogers 1984; Callea 1986; Richmond 1984). Return appears to be
guided by the opportunities that migrants expect to find in their origin countries but
also by the opportunities already offered in their respective host countries. As
situational and structural factors have a certain bearing on the return decision,
according to Gmelch, the return decision cannot be planned properly as these
situational factors need to be gauged a posteriori by the migrants.
To the extent that situational factors are gauged a posteriori, migrants are viewed as
being “ill prepared for their return” (Gmelch 1980, 143), owing to the fact that it is
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difficult for them to gather the information needed to secure their return and to gain
better awareness of the social, economic and political changes that have, in the
meantime, occurred in their origin countries.
Whatever the level of expectations of returnees, the structural approach to return
migration contends that these are more often than not readjusted to local realities
and that, owing to the strength of traditional vested interests in origin countries,
returnees have a limited innovative influence in their origin societies. It also
contends that if readjustment does not take place, the returnee may contemplate reemigration.
The structural approach to return migration is essential to show how influential
contextual factors may be on the returnees’ capacity to innovate and to appear as
actors of change. Not only do skills and financial capital shape return experiences,
but local power relations, traditions and values in home countries also have a
strong bearing on the returnees’ capacity to invest their migration experiences in
their home countries.
In contrast to the neoclassical economics and the new economics of labour
migration theoretical frameworks, the structural approach to return migration
focuses on the extent to which returnees may or may not have an impact on their
origin societies once return takes place. As explained above, their analytical
framework refers to the consequences that return migration may generate in home
countries, with reference to two variables: time and space.
Time pertains to the duration of stay abroad and to the change that occurred before
and after migration, with reference to the status of returnees and to their origin
societies. Social changes in origin societies, as well as professional advancement,
are critical to the reintegration process of returnees. As W. Dumon put it, “the
returnee can be defined as a person who, in order to be reaccepted, has to readapt to
the changed cultural and behavioural patterns of his community of origin and this
is resocialization” (Dumon 1986, 122). This process of readjustment takes time,
depending on the duration of the migration experience. At the same time, the
duration of stay abroad has to be optimised in order to allow migrants to acquire
and diversify their skills in the likelihood of investing them once return takes place
(Dustmann 2001). As Russell King suggests:
If [the duration of stay abroad] is very short, say less than a year or two, the
migrant will have gained too little experience to be of any use in promoting
modernisation back home. If the period of absence is very long, returnees may be
so alienated from their origin society, or they may be so old, that again the
influence exerted will be small. Somewhere in between, an optimum length of
absence might be found whereby the absence is sufficiently long to have
influenced the migrant and allowed him to absorb certain experiences and values,
and yet sufficiently short that he still has time and energy upon return to utilise
his newly acquired skills and attitudes (King 1986, 19).
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As far as space is concerned, structuralists argue that the area of settlement
(i.e. rural or urban) determines the reintegration process of returnees and reshapes
their expectations. Nora Colton’s study on Yemeni returnees from Saudi Arabia is
a case in point. The survey she carried out in rural Yemen showed that, despite the
fact that returnees had improved their living standards as well as those of their
families, they did not “significantly change old values” (Colton 1993, 879); rather
they tended to reinforce them. Colton accounts for this phenomenon with reference
to the fact that the expectations of returnees are significantly shaped by the high
expectations of the return environment (i.e. family and friends who remained at
home).
Finally, in the view of structuralists, because returnees adapt their expectations and
behaviours to local societies, with a view to becoming “reaccepted”, they tend to
orient their consumption patterns to unproductive investments and to conspicuous
consumption (Byron and Condon 1996, 100). Furthermore, resources tend to be
monopolised by the family members who invest savings in the building of big
houses and in the purchase of luxury cars, instead of using savings to modernise,
for example, agricultural machinery. These consumption patterns reproduce and
breed the unequal relationship between the core (receiving countries) and the
periphery (sending countries) – a fundamental of the structural approach to
international migration, in general, and to return migration, in particular.
Thanks to the structural approach, return is no longer viewed as being exclusively
affected by the migration experience of the individual in host countries. As Lewis
and Williams highlighted in their article on Portuguese returnees, the “locality”
(i.e. local context in migrants’ origin countries) has a great “influence on the
impact of return migrants” (Lewis and Williams 1986, 125). A business-friendly
institutional context, as well as economic progress in origin countries, is crucial to
allow productive investments to be made. Existing institutional characteristics in
origin countries also affect (negatively or positively) the impact of return migration
on development and social progress. These contextual factors are further examined
in the second section of this study.
Structuralists have in fact focused more on how returnees’ initiatives could favour
economic development when faced with local power structures than on the return
migration phenomenon per se. They tend to limit the experiences of migration of
the returnees to the mere acquisition of skills – which more often than not are
wasted owing to the structural constraints inherent in origin economies – and to the
use of foreign-earned incomes. In other words, there seems to be no continuum
between the returnees’ migration experiences in their former receiving countries
and their situation in their origin countries. Moreover, the impact of resources,
whether financial or human, tangible or intangible, remains extremely limited,
owing to the fact that these are embedded in a traditional family context which
defines the symbolic and behavioural patterns with which the returnees will need to
comply if they want to be reaccepted back home.
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Returnees’ initiatives are assessed pessimistically by structuralists. The latter also
offer a partial vision of return migration whose impact is embedded in a top-down
framework of analysis, where the state of the origin country appears as the actor
who structures the local power relations and provides more opportunities and
upward mobility. Even the innovative returnee depicted by Cerase offers a
disillusioned picture of the human and financial potentials of return migrants:
Two things account for his [i.e. the innovative returnee] failure: The first is the
economy of the village or town of repatriation; the second, the power relations
among the various classes which constitute these communities (Cerase 1974,
258).
In the end, returnees fail in pursuing their interests because they have remained for
too long outside the “traditional ways of thinking” in their origin societies, at the
same time losing their networks of social relationships. In other words, migrants
when abroad do not retain links with their countries of origin.
This core/periphery dichotomy draws the line between two separate worlds: the
modern countries of immigration and the traditional countries of origin of the
returnees. This structural dichotomy, strongly criticised by Rachel Murphy (2002),
is based on the assumptions that little information and few exchanges exist between
these two worlds and that the returnee will never be in a position to mobilise the
adequate resources and skills needed to face the real conditions at home, with a
view to facilitating reintegration (Velikonja 1984). As shown in the following
sections, these assumptions are strongly questioned by transnationalists and social
network theorists.
1.3. Transnationalism and Return Migration
This section is not so much an attempt to conceptualise transnationalism as a way
of highlighting the assumptions on which it is based when dealing with return
migration and returnees.
As of the late 1980s, in an attempt to highlight the dynamic and maintenance of
regular migration linkages between sending and receiving countries – a fact often
overlooked by the structuralists – and to interpret the back-and-forth movement of
people crossing borders, migration scholars from different disciplines started to
adopt the transnational terminology initially used by international relations scholars.
There is no question that this terminological borrowing has been subject to various
interpretations and understandings that generated a great deal of sloppiness in its
usage and analytical relevance in the field of migration.
Transnationalism constitutes an attempt to formulate a theoretical and conceptual
framework aimed at a better understanding of the strong social and economic links
between migrants’ host and origin countries. Transnational activities are
implemented, according to Alejandro Portes, by “regular and sustained social
contacts over time across national borders” (Portes et al. 1999, 219). It also
Theorising Return Migration
262
explains how influential such links can be on the identities of migrants. Unlike the
structuralists and the advocates of NELM, return does not constitute the end of a
migration cycle. In the view of transnationalists, the migration story continues.
Return migration is part and parcel of a circular system of social and economic
relationships and exchanges facilitating the reintegration of migrants while
conveying knowledge, information and membership. One of the main contrasts
between transnationalism and structuralism lies in the fact that, according to
transnationalists, returnees prepare their reintegration at home through periodical
and regular visits to their home countries. They retain strong links with their home
countries and periodically send remittances to their households.
In the field of migration, the conceptual framework is based on two interrelated
fields of investigation: transnational identities and transnational mobility.
Transnational identities result from the combination of migrants’ origins with the
identities they acquire in their host countries. According to transnationalists, this
combination leads more to the development of “double identities” than to the
emergence of conflicting identities. Migrants are viewed as having the capacity to
negotiate their places in society, whether in host or origin countries, with a view to
becoming part of it. Unlike the structuralists, who prefer to talk about adjustment,
the transnationalists recognise the need for “adaptation” when returning home. The
process of adaptation does not entail the abandonment of the identities they acquire
abroad. Admittedly, returnees are faced with difficulties of reintegration, at both
social and professional levels. However, as mentioned above, the regular contacts
they maintain with their households in origin countries, as well as the back-andforth movements which illustrate transnational mobility (Portes 1999), allow their
return to be better prepared and organised. While migrants are viewed as being
successful in weighing the costs and benefits of return, the actual impact with local
realities at home – at social, economic and political levels – may lead to the
emergence and consolidation of transnational identities that shape the behaviours
and expectations of the returnees.
In the field of transnationalism, the volume edited by Nadje Al-Ali and Khalid
Koser presents an enlightening vision of how migrants’ conception of “homeland”
may rest on various allegiances. Migrants may be attached to their countries of
birth, while being at the same time emotionally connected to their places of origin,
and vice versa. For transnationalists, the migrants’ subjective perceptions of
homeland and their self-identification have a bearing on their decision to return and
on their process of reintegration, because they provide a meaning which has a
social and historical background. Finally, Al-Ali and Koser (2002, 10) argue that
“another characteristic of transnational migrants is that they maintain economic,
political and social networks that span several societies. What defines membership
of these networks is a common country of origin or a shared origin”. Common
ethnicity, common origin and kinship linkages appear to be the main factors that
lubricate transnational activities and define transnational identities. Migrants
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belong to geographically dispersed groups and “feel linked to one another by their
common place-of-origin and their shared religious and social ties” (Levitt 1998, 4).
Transnationalism also aims to illustrate how “the development of new identities
among migrants, who are anchored (socially, culturally and physically) neither in
their place of origin nor in their place of destination” (Al-Ali and Koser 2002, 4)
has been conducive to the gradual deterritorialisation of citizenship. This
controversial assertion has been sustained through the recurrent reference to
“diasporas” which is still in vogue among the advocates of transnationalism,
although some of them are now questioning its analytical relevance, while
specifically limiting its use to highly institutionalised transnational communities1
(Schnapper 2001, 31; Faist 1999). There is no doubt that this terminological
borrowing is not so much a way of stressing migrants’ longing for return to their
homeland (as the reference to diaspora would induce us to think) as an attempt to
show that “governments of sending countries have moved in recent years to
intensify their contacts with their diasporas and involve them in various forms of
national life” (Portes 2001, 190). Moreover, when referring to diasporas, the ethnic
reference cannot be denied.
Transnationalism also pertains to goal-oriented initiatives that are collectively
coordinated and that have been gradually institutionalised as a result of their
interaction with sending countries’ governments. There exist many emblematic
cases in the world showing how governments have been responsive to the political
and economic empowering of their migrant communities abroad. More often than
not these institutionalised relationships have “reconstructed the ties between the
emigrant and the homeland” (Brand 2002, 6; Leichtman 2002) through the creation
of state institutions and para-statal bodies aimed above all at responding to the
economic, security and political concerns of home countries, more than at
promoting return to the homeland. True, this process is not at all new in the history
of international migrations (Vertovec 1999, 145). Nonetheless, as the term diaspora
has now entered the lexicon of many government officials, it is reasonable to
believe that the institutionalisation of transnational activities has made them more
manageable, from an economic point of view, and more permeable to political
concerns (Al-Ali et al. 2001, 590–1).
In fact, transnationalism refers not only to the maintenance of strong linkages
between migrants and their families or households in origin countries, but also to
the multifarious ways in which migrants feel linked to one another by their
common ethnic origins and in-group solidarity. Their human and financial
resources seem to be embedded in an ethnically defined framework of interaction
(Hsing 1998). The transnational approach to international migrations tends to view
the action of migrants as the direct outcome of their belonging to their own
1
When referring to diasporas, Thomas Faist prefers to talk about “a specific type of transnational
community”. He argues that “it is not useful to apply the term diaspora to settlers and labor
migrants because they did not experience traumatic experiences and it cannot be said that most of
the members of these groups yearn to return to their lost homeland” (Faist 1999, 10).
Theorising Return Migration
264
(dispersed) migrant community. In-group solidarity and resources are defined with
reference to the transnational community in which their initiatives and expectations
are embedded.
Importantly, as mentioned above, transnational practices are viewed as being
porous vis-à-vis state interference, as their level of institutionalisation is gaining
momentum. Furthermore, in the field of transnational identities, these are viewed
as being the direct outcome of practices which evolve in a kind of dual space of
identification spanning the nation-states of host and origin countries.2
While transnationalists seem to agree on the interaction between nation-states and
transnational migrant communities, they also admit that further investigations are
needed to understand the extent to which this interaction has shaped the magnitude
and sphere of influence of both entities. Furthermore, while some of them argue
that “immigrant transnationalism is not driven by ideological reasons but by the
very logic of global capitalism” (Portes 2001, 187), others, on the contrary, contend
that “transnational communities can wield substantial political, economic and
social power” (Al-Ali and Koser 2002, 12).
Beyond these divergent interpretations, it is important to mention that, in the field
of return migration, transnationalism allows cross-border linkages between the
returnees and their migrant communities abroad to be highlighted. Return takes
place once enough resources, whether financial or informational, have been
gathered and when conditions at home are viewed as being favourable enough. In a
transnational stance, return has been dealt with while referring to the ways in which
returnees are successful in adapting themselves to their home environment, at all
levels. They know how to take advantage of the “identity attributes” they acquired
abroad, with a view to distinguishing themselves from the locals. Returnees may be
faced with social pressures or feel marginalised by their own origin society, while
at the same time trying to negotiate their places in society without denying their
own specificities.
Finally, thanks to the transnationalist approach to international migrations, in
general, and to return migration, in particular, it is possible to question the binary
structuralist vision of cross-border movements, taking into account the circularity
of migration movements which facilitates migrants’ mobility (Chapman and
Prothero 1983–84). The reference to the term diaspora could be said to constitute a
way of highlighting the multi-polar mobility of migrants.
2
Luis Eduardo Guarnizo argues that transnational practices and discourses do not necessarily
undermine the nation-state as transnational relations are closely interconnected with national state
structures, either in the receiving or in the sending country. He adds: “Transnational practices are to
nationalism what informal economic practices are to the formal economy. By definition, they are
dialectically interrelated: if one disappears, the other will disappear with it. After all, transnational
practices are only possible in a global system of nation-states” (Guarnizo 1998).
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Despite these valuable insights, it is difficult to understand how the maintenance of
strong linkages with their migrant communities abroad allows the returnees to
better cope with the traditional vested interests and social pressures that
characterise their origin societies. Moreover, in so far as transnationalists focus on
the double or hybrid identities of migrants and on their cross-border mobility, the
transnational approach to return migration seems to encapsulate their initiatives and
projects at home in a fundamental set of mutual obligations, opportunities and
expectations stemming from common ethnicity (i.e. the diaspora) and kinship
(i.e. the family, the household).
As explained in this study, the theoretical insights stemming from network theories
allow the analytical framework of return migration to be better explored, while
going beyond the embeddedness of the diaspora and kinship relationships. In fact,
whereas transnationalism views returnees as actors who gather the resources
needed to secure and prepare their return to the homeland by mobilising resources
stemming from the commonality of attributes (e.g. religion and ethnicity), social
network theory views them as actors who gather the resources needed to secure and
prepare their return to the homeland by mobilising resources stemming from the
commonality of interests and available at the level of social and economic crossborder networks.
1.4. Social Network Theory and Return Migration
Just like the transnational approach to return migration, social network theory
views returnees as being the bearers of tangible and intangible resources. Although
the respective impact of tangible and intangible resources on return migrants’
initiatives is difficult to evaluate a priori, it seems essential to examine return
migration with constant reference to these elements. Just like the transnational
approach to return migration, social network theory views returnees as migrants
who maintain strong linkages with their former places of settlement in other
countries. However, such linkages are not the direct outcome of the abovementioned commonality of attributes. They are not necessarily dependent on
diasporas, as defined by transnationalists. Rather, in a network theoretical stance,
linkages reflect an experience of migration that may provide a significant adjunct
to the returnees’ initiatives at home. Resources needed to secure return back home
also stem from patterns of interpersonal relationships that may derive from the
returnees’ past experiences of migration.
Social structures increase the availability of resources and information, while
securing the effective initiatives of return migrants. Thus, the composition of
networks, which consist of a multiplicity of social structures (Eccles and Nohria
1992), as well as the configuration of linkages, is of paramount importance to
examine the fundamentals that define and maintain the cross-border linkages in
which return migrants are involved. When analysing cross-border linkages in terms
of networks, no pre-established categorical attribute allows the fundamentals of
network dynamics to be depicted.
Theorising Return Migration
266
Moreover, social network theorists do not take network membership for granted:
first, because networks are selectively organised (Church et al. 2002, 23); second,
because membership requires a voluntary act from the actors themselves as well as
the consent of other members with a view to guaranteeing the flows of resources as
well as the effectiveness and maintenance of cross-border linkages. In fact, crossborder social and economic networks correspond to “a social entity [that] exists as
a collectively shared subjective awareness” (Laumann et al. 1983, 21). Furthermore,
the formation and maintenance of networks require long-standing interpersonal
relationships, as well as the regular exchange of mutually valuable items between
actors. This pattern of exchange is maintained thanks to the circularity inherent in
these networks.
However, it should be noted that other resources are also important to the success
of returnees’ initiatives and projects following their return. The availability of these
resources would also seem to lie in the social capital from which return migrants
benefited before migrating. On the one hand, past migration experience alone does
not fully explain the returnees’ initiatives. On the other hand, in terms of social
capital, return migrants do not represent a homogeneous group. Social capital,
which in the words of James Coleman, “inheres in the structure of relations
between actors and among actors” (Coleman 1988, S110), has to be viewed as
resources provided by the returnees’ families or households. In other words, preexisting social and financial resources, which are provided by the family, may
shape the performance of return migrants. Social capital pertains to the resources
from which the returnees may benefit. It is reasonable to think that social capital
and the potential involvement of return migrants in cross-border social networks
may be viewed as resources that complement and shape one another.
Fundamentally, whether they are highly skilled or not, economic migrants or
refugees, returnees have to be viewed as social actors who may find ways to ensure
their return to their homelands, and participate in the dynamics of cross-border
networks. The social networks in which returnees are involved constitute systems
of social relations that may have a communal or an associative basis. The former
refers to long-term relationships between network members whose exchange
relations are influenced by their relational contents. The latter refers to a selective
group of actors whose relationships are defined in terms of associative membership.
Whether they have a communal or an associative basis, the organisational
characteristics of cross-border social and economic networks are responsive to the
economic, social and political context in receiving and sending countries. The
reference to social network theory allows the gap to be bridged between the
organisational structure of networks and the relational content that actors attach to
their own involvement and membership in such networks. Network theory
articulates two levels of study.
First, return migrants are seen as social actors who are involved in a set of
relational ramifications. By analysing the practice of network membership, other
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elements of analysis may highlight the multiplicity of involvements of these actors,
as well as the types of organisation that are influential on their behaviours. Second,
different network structures offer different opportunities in a given context, and
different orientations and strategies. It may be from this perspective that actors
derive their interests and that, at the same time, networks persist.
It now appears clear that cross-border social and economic networks differ from
transnational relationships, in terms of organisational patterns, goals and
configuration. Networks pertain to “a specific type of relation linking a defined set
of persons, objects, or events. ... The set of persons, objects, or events on which a
network is defined … possess some attribute(s) that identify them as members of
the same equivalence class for purposes of determining the network of relations
among them” (Knoke and Kuklinski 1982, 12; Thompson et al. 1991). The
definition of David Knoke and James Kuklinski emphasises the need to consider
the relational content of network ties that underpins the network structure to which
returnees may belong.
Furthermore, returnees are viewed as actors who confer a subjective meaning to
their embedded actions, in a given context. In fact, network relationships can be
based on the principle of “complementarity” (Laumann et al. 1978, 462) which
may occur in a situation where actors, who differ in terms of access to resources,
personal characteristics and ascribed attributes, decide to enter into a partnership
which will be beneficial to both parties. Furthermore, the returnees' awareness of
their network involvement must also be taken into account. This can also be
defined with reference to the fact that their own vision of the world generates a
form of intellectual ambience; a form of distinctiveness that the returnees like
cultivating.
This contention echoes the statements made by Phillips and Potter (2003), as well
as by Elizabeth Thomas-Hope (1999), when they respectively interviewed
returnees to Barbados and Jamaica. Distinctiveness is far from being irrelevant, for
it certainly shapes the returnees’ feelings of belonging to an “entity” (Weber 1994,
16), which not only generates mutual understanding and conveys referents, but also
delimits the boundaries of the social networks in which actors are involved.
Moreover, distinctiveness is part and parcel of a process of identification.
Distinctiveness not only illustrates the subjective awareness of the actors involved
in cross-border social and economic networks, but also shows this desire to be part
of communal social relationships that both delimit the boundaries of the network
(between those who are in and those who are out) and may generate mutual
understanding.
Clearly, when analysing the configuration of cross-border social networks,
attention has to be paid to the meaningfulness for actors of being involved in
network structures. In the same vein, their perceived position in the patterns of
partnerships seems to have a certain bearing on the extent to which these actors
subjectively identify themselves with their networks of social relationships. In
Theorising Return Migration
268
other words, there exist as many degrees of network embeddedness as there are
various types of relational contents.
The five theoretical approaches that have been critically reviewed in this study and
epitomised in Table 1 all contribute to better understanding the return migration
phenomenon. Whether these approaches focus primarily on the economic aspects
of return migration, at the individual or household levels (i.e. neoclassical
economics, NELM) or the micro and macro dimensions of return migration
(e.g. structuralism, transnationalism, social network theory), the various ways in
which return has been analysed and returnees depicted differ in terms of levels of
analysis and research framework.
Despite such differences, they are all illustrative of the various stages of
development and maturation that characterise international migration streams
(Martin and Widgren 2002). In fact, the foregoing comparative analysis of the
theories of return migration sheds light on the economic and non-economic
motivations for return, and on the need to contextualise return, in an ad hoc manner.
Just as there exist several demand-pull and supply-push factors that account for the
dynamics of international migration, there also exist various micro and macro
factors that motivate return and shape its configuration, under specific
circumstances. It is the observer’s task to identify the predominant factors.
2. The Need to Revisit the Conceptual Approach to the Returnee
Thanks to the insights of transnationalism and social network theory, return is no
longer viewed as the end of the migration cycle; rather, it constitutes one stage in
the migration process. In fact, while recognising the influence of structural micro
and macro factors in origin countries, both theoretical frameworks argue that the
maintenance of linkages between receiving and origin countries fosters the ability
of migrants to prepare and secure their own return, as opposed to what
structuralists contend. Nonetheless, analyses of such linkages differ.
While transnational linkages emerge spontaneously at a cross-border level, on the
basis of the commonality of such attributes as ethnicity and kinship, social network
theory contends that the emergence of cross-border networks between receiving
and sending countries is responsive to contextual and institutional factors. Crossborder social and economic networks are conducive to complementary exchange
relations among actors which may go beyond this commonality of attributes. In
fact, these exchange relations are viewed as being based on the commonality of
interests, and not on attributes. Social network theory constitutes a broader
framework of analysis which allows the complexity of return migration issues to be
highlighted.
Having explained the analytical fruitfulness of social network theory, four basic
reasons for which a revisited conceptual approach to returnees is needed may be
identified.
269
Table 1: Theories of Return Migration
Jean-Pierre Cassarino
Theorising Return Migration
270
•
First, the growing diversity inherent in international migration flows (Stalker
2003, 169) suggests that the analytical and interpretative framework of return
migration needs to be broadened. This should not only refer to labour migrants,
whether skilled or unskilled, but also to migrant students, asylum seekers and
refugees.
•
Second, the emergence and consolidation of regional trading blocks, at a global
level, has favoured the liberalisation of markets, as well as the development of
the private sector, in many developing economies. Despite the potential
resilience of state interference in most developing economies, liberal reforms in
many migrant-sending countries have created the basis for increased business
activities, not only for non-migrants, but also for migrants in general, and
returnees in particular.
•
Third, cross-border mobility has been sustained by cheaper transport costs.
These have made return a multiple-stage process.
•
Fourth, technological means of communication have favoured the development
of flows of information, as well as the strengthening of cross-border linkages,
between origin and host countries, while allowing migrants to better prepare
their return.
These four reasons account for the need to revisit our analytical variables while
recognising that, in terms of migration experiences, length of stay abroad, patterns
of resource mobilisation, legal status, motivations and projects, returnees constitute
today an extremely heterogeneous group of actors. Similarly, their impact on
sending countries and potential for development vary accordingly.
Admittedly, as Rosemarie Rogers (1984) stressed, returnees differ substantially in
terms of return motivations. Her seminal paper has in fact demonstrated that not
only are reasons to return highly variegated but that they also tend to overlap.
Today, return motivations have become diversified as new categories of returnees
have been taken into consideration. In fact, scholarly approaches to return
motivations do not only concern labour migrants (Kubat, 1984; King 1986),
migrant-students (Glaser and Habers 1974), highly skilled migrants (Lowell 2001;
McLaughan and Salt 2002, Iredale and Guo 2001; Vertovec 2002; Cervantes and
Guellec 2002), entrepreneur-returnees (Cassarino 2000), but also refugees and
asylum seekers (Al-Ali et al. 2001; Ammassari and Black 2001; Ghosh 2000).
Moreover, the gradual broadening of the return migration spectrum has not only
entailed the growing diversity of return motivations, but also the variety of
resource mobilisation patterns. These patterns are certainly reflective of the
returnees’ migration experiences abroad, but not only that. They are also
responsive to specific institutional, political and economic conditions at home that
need to be considered in order to understand why some returnees may appear as
actors of change at home while others do not.
271
Jean-Pierre Cassarino
2.1. Resource Mobilisation and the Returnee’s Preparedness
In the context of this study, it is argued that the propensity of migrants to become
actors of change and development at home depends on the extent to which they
have provided for the preparation of their return. To be successfully achieved,
return preparation requires time, resources and willingness on the part of the
migrant. In other words, there exist various degrees of return preparation that differ
in terms of resource mobilisation and preparedness. As a prerequisite to
introducing the conceptual framework, these criteria need to be further explained
and defined.
Resource mobilisation draws on the above-mentioned insights of social network
theory and pertains to tangible (i.e. financial capital) and intangible (i.e. contacts,
relationships, skills, acquaintances) resources that have been mobilised during the
migration experience abroad. Resource mobilisation also includes resources that
the migrants had brought with them prior to leaving their origin country (i.e. social
capital). In fact, these two subgroups of resources are part and parcel of resource
mobilisation. It hardly needs to be stressed that resource mobilisation patterns vary
with the experiences of migration of the returnees as well as with their social
backgrounds.
Preparedness pertains not only to the willingness of migrants to return home, but
also to their readiness to return. In other words, the returnee’s preparedness refers
to a voluntary act that must be supported by the gathering of sufficient resources
and information about post-return conditions at home. Clearly, the returnee’s
preparedness goes beyond the free-choice basis that has been introduced by the
Council of Europe (1987). To strengthen the link between return migration and
development at home, return should not simply be viewed as a voluntary act on the
part of the migrant but, above all, as a proof of readiness. Figure 1 clarifies the
ways in which these concepts interact with each other, while being at the same time
reflective of circumstances in host and home countries.
Figure 1. Return Preparation
The returnee’s preparedness
Willingness to return
Readiness to return
Circumstances in host
and home countries
Resource Mobilisation
Tangible resources
Intangible resources
Social capital
Theorising Return Migration
272
The emphasis on the willingness and readiness of the migrant to return (i.e. the
returnee’s preparedness) yields various analytical benefits:
1. It argues that return is not only a voluntary act. Return also pertains to a
process of resource mobilisation that requires time. Moreover, migrants
may manifest their wish to return without necessarily being ready to return.
2. With regard to the link between return migration and development, it
shows that, irrespective of their legal status in host countries, returnees
differ in terms of levels of preparedness and patterns of resource
mobilisation. For example, a labour migrant whose experience of migration
was optimal (King 1986, 19; Dustmann 2001) (i.e. neither too short nor too
long to invest the human and financial capital acquired abroad) will have a
higher level of preparedness than the labour migrant whose experience of
migration was too short to provide for return readiness. Similarly, a
migrant who qualified for refuge or asylum in a host country, and whose
length of stay was optimal, will have greater opportunities to mobilise
enough resources, whether tangible or intangible, to become prepared for
return, than a migrant who did not qualify for asylum or refuge.
3. It regards various types of migrant ranging from economic, skilled and
unskilled to refugees. In other words, returnees differ not only in terms of
motivations, but also in terms of levels of preparedness and patterns of
resource mobilisation.
4. It shows that the returnee’s preparedness is not only dependent on the
migrant’s experience abroad, but also on the perception that significant
institutional, economic and political changes have occurred at home. These
circumstances have a bearing on how resources are mobilised and used
after return.
5. It highlights the fact that the returnee’s preparedness is shaped by
circumstances in host and home countries, i.e. by pre- and post-return
conditions.
6. It takes into account migrants’ preparedness to return while arguing that
the returnees’ impact on development at home is dependent on their levels
of preparedness.
Having defined resource mobilisation and the returnee’s preparedness, Table 2 has
to be viewed as a framework of analysis which is useful in assessing and
understanding the extent to which the levels of preparedness, the patterns of
resource mobilisation adopted by returnees, as well as pre- and post-return
273
Jean-Pierre Cassarino
conditions, and their average length of stay abroad, impact on their reintegration
processes and on their potential for development at home.
Table 2: Returnees’ Level of Preparedness
Theorising Return Migration
274
This caveat is exclusively concerned with people who have returned from their host
countries. It includes three levels of preparedness which are consequential on how
resources, if at all, may be mobilised before and also after return. As mentioned,
the positive impact of return migration at home is not only a question of
willingness on the part of returnees, but also (if not above all) a question of
preparation and resource mobilisation patterns shaped by pre- and post-return
conditions. This statement goes beyond the success/failure dichotomy and suggests
delving into the micro and macro factors that substantially configure return patterns
and turn returnees into potential actors of development.
The first category refers to returnees whose high level of preparedness allows them
to organise their own return autonomously while mobilising the resources needed
to secure their return. This category pertains to migrants who feel they have
gathered enough tangible and intangible resources to carry out their projects in
their home countries. They have also developed valuable contacts and acquired
skills and knowledge that can constitute a significant adjunct to their initiatives.
They have had time to evaluate the costs and benefits of return, while considering
the changes that have occurred in their countries of origin, at institutional,
economic and political levels. Some of them may maintain their residential status
in their former places of settlement with a view to securing their cross-border
mobility. Their high level of preparedness influences their participation in crossborder social and economic networks; these convey informational and financial
resources that can foster resource mobilisation not only before return but also
afterwards. Some migrants’ projects at home may be shaped by public programmes,
promoted by origin countries’ governments, and aimed at repatriating skilled and
business returnees. Although the impact of such return-friendly state-sponsored
programmes has still to be better estimated, their implementation may be viewed as
a positive change by returnees.3 Often, these programmes are accompanied by the
creation of off-shore industrial zones and technological parks in origin countries,
aimed at attracting foreign direct investments (FDIs) and business returnees
(Cassarino 2000).
The second category includes returnees having a low level of preparedness. This
category pertains to migrants whose length of stay abroad was too short to allow
tangible and intangible resources to be mobilised, owing to major events which
abruptly interrupted their migration experiences, e.g. unexpected family events,
ostracism, no real opportunities for social and professional advancement in host
countries. These migrants consider that the costs of remaining are higher than those
of returning home, even if few resources were mobilised before their return. Hence,
3
This is what Robin Iredale and Fei Guo (2001, 14) observed during a survey related to
Chinese returnees from Australia. The authors argue, “although the Chinese government’s
incentive programs don’t appear to have had a direct impact on people’s decision-making
processes in Australia, they have provided a positive signal from the government that the
social environment and policies in China are improving.”
275
Jean-Pierre Cassarino
resource mobilisation in receiving countries remains extremely limited and the
returnee will tend to rely on resources available at home in order to reintegrate.
The third category pertains to returnees whose level of preparedness is non-existent.
These returnees neither contemplated return nor did they provide for the
preparation of return. Circumstances in host countries prompted them to leave, for
example as a result of a rejected application for asylum or following forced
repatriation.
3. Conclusion
This conceptual caveat suggests that, owing to the growing diversity of returnees,
we need to approach the return migration phenomenon while taking into account
new variables explaining how, and under which circumstances, migrants return.
Clearly, as Bimal Ghosh points out, return “is largely influenced by the initial
motivations for migration as well as by the duration of the stay abroad and
particularly by the conditions under which the return takes place” (Ghosh 2000,
185). The findings presented in Table 2 confirm his argument. At the same time,
the reference to the returnee’s preparedness (see Figure 1) and patterns of resource
mobilisation complements Ghosh’s argument. This dual reference takes our
understanding of how and why returnees may contribute to development a step
further.
This revisited conceptual framework induces us to think that the point is not so
much to focus exclusively on the voluntary dimension of return as to apprehend the
level of preparedness of the returnee, i.e. willingness and readiness to return.
Preparedness is far from being a vague notion; it puts emphasis on the returnees’
ability to gather tangible and intangible resources when return takes place
autonomously. The higher the level of preparedness, the greater the ability of
returnees to mobilise resources autonomously and the stronger their contribution to
development. Moreover, the theoretical insights stemming from social network
theory are crucial in understanding the ways in which returnees mobilise their
resources while at the same time being involved in the dynamic and maintenance
of cross-border social and economic networks. These networks do not emerge
spontaneously; rather, they are responsive to specific pre- and post-return
conditions. They also generate a continuum between the migrants’ experiences
lived in host countries and their situations in origin countries. This continuum
regards exclusively those returnees who benefit from a high level of preparedness.
Conversely, it is non-existent for returnees having a low or no level of
preparedness.
These remarks are of paramount importance in understanding that the length and
type of migration experiences lived abroad have a certain bearing on the various
levels of preparedness of returnees and on their potential capacity to contribute to
development. Again, the notions pertaining to resource mobilisation and to the
returnee’s preparedness must be taken into consideration in order to explain why
Theorising Return Migration
276
some returnees turn out to be actors of development whereas others do not. Return
refers to a preparation process that can be optimally invested in development if it
takes place autonomously and if the migration experience is long enough to foster
resource mobilisation. How does the above caveat posit itself with regard to these
observations? First it recognises that international migration streams have reached
a degree of maturation that allows return to be autonomously prepared, if
conditions in receiving and sending countries are favourable enough to allow
resources to be mobilised. Then it shows that resource mobilisation, which inheres
in the preparation process of return and depends on the dynamics of cross-border
social and economic networks, is a prerequisite to securing return. Finally it argues
that a continuum is needed to allow resources to be mobilised not only before but
also after return.
Notes
•
The author is grateful to Jaap Dronkers, Philippe Fargues, Nicola Hargreaves,
Dawn Lyon, Laura Terzera and Nathalie Tocci for their fruitful comments on
an earlier draft of this paper.
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About the Author:
Jean-Pierre Cassarino earned his Ph.D. in political and social sciences at the
European University Institute (EUI). Formerly with the International Organization
for Migration in Rabat (Morocco), he is currently doing research on migration
management and policy-making in the Euro-Mediterranean region at the Robert
Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies (Florence, Italy). His publications include,
among others, Tunisian New Entrepreneurs and their Past Experiences of
Migration in Europe: Resource Mobilization, Networks, and Hidden Disaffection
(Ashgate 2000) and The Theories of Ethnic Entrepreneurship and the Alternative
Arguments of Social Action and Network Analysis (EUI Working Paper No. 97/1
1997); email: JPCassarino@iue.it
Alive and Kicking?
Multiculturalism in Flanders*
DIRK JACOBS
Université Libre de Bruxelles
Katholieke Universiteit Brussel
Flanders, the Flemish part of Belgium, is in mid-2004 still embracing
the idea of multiculturalism – the recognition and protection of
immigrants as distinct ethnic groups – while this idea is in crisis in the
neighbouring country of the Netherlands from where it was imported.
Two reasons can be cited to explain the survival of multiculturalism in
the region. First of all, the transformation of the Flemish political
landscape, in which issues pertaining to immigrant incorporation are
of central importance, accounts for the resilience of the idea and
practice of multiculturalism in Flemish policy-making. In addition, the
multicultural model has been able to survive due to the intertwining of
issues linked to immigrant incorporation on the one hand, and
multinational politics on the other, in the context of the BrusselsCapital Region.
F
landers is a small subnational entity of the federal state of Belgium, which is
itself a tiny state. Flanders has only 6 million inhabitants – a little more than
Denmark – and thus merely constitutes one of the smaller pieces of the European
puzzle. No wonder it is often forgotten or put aside in academic reflections and
empirical comparative studies on immigrant integration in European societies.
Flanders and its particular link to the Belgian capital Brussels, nevertheless, might
be a relevant – or at least curious – case for international scholars to look into at
times. In this paper I briefly discuss Flanders as a deviant case in the assertion that
there is a European-wide trend towards assimilation in integration policy and we
are witnessing “the end of multiculturalism” in liberal nation-states. While it is
argued by influential authors that multicultural ideology and multicultural policies
are in crisis in Europe (Joppke and Morawska 2003), the importance of ethnic
identity and multiculturalism seems to have been strengthened in Flemish policy.
Although “citizenship trajectories” for newcomers (stressing language acquisition)
have been installed, self-organisation of ethnic minorities is actively endorsed and
the importance of the notion of “diversity” in immigrant incorporation policy has
increased over the last few years. There is reason to claim that this goes beyond
“the inevitable trend towards de facto multiculturalism in liberal states” (Joppke
8nternational Journal on Multicultural Societies (IJMS), Vol. 6, No. 2, 2004: 280 - 299
ISSN 1817-4574, www.unesco.org/shs/ijms/vol6/issue2/art5 © UNESCO
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and Morawska 2003, 10). Why is Flanders still embracing the idea of
multiculturalism – the recognition and protection of immigrants as distinct ethnic
groups – while it is in crisis in the neighbouring Netherlands, which had served as
an example?
I argue that an important reason is the transformation of the Flemish political
landscape, where issues pertaining to immigrant incorporation are of central
importance, which accounts for the resilience of the idea and practice of
multiculturalism in Flemish policy-making. This is partly to be understood in the
light of a party landscape and a proportional electoral system which only allow for
multiparty governments of a limited number of possible coalitions – as long as the
extreme-right remains ostracised. In addition, the multicultural model has been able
to survive due to the intertwining of issues linked to immigrant incorporation on
the one hand, and multinational politics on the other, in the context of the BrusselsCapital Region. Before we can look into all this, a crash course in the institutional
architecture of Belgium is probably inevitable.
1. Multinational Institutional Arrangements in Belgium
Canadian political philosopher Will Kymlicka has correctly stressed that the issue
of multicultural citizenship, or the recognition of ethno-cultural pluralism in
modern states, should best be looked at by distinguishing “multinational” diversity
on the one hand and “polyethnic” diversity on the other (Kymlicka 1995). Indeed,
multiculturalism can be related to the topic of incorporation of founding
autochthonous or native cultures – sometimes called “national minorities” – into a
larger state, but it can just as well refer to the incorporation of cultural diversity
brought by immigrant newcomers. In order to avoid confusion, Kymlicka proposes
to use distinct terms to designate both situations.
The framework of Kymlicka has been criticised as being too North American,
anecdotal and inapt for unmodified European use (Favell and Modood 2002), but
its terminology is nevertheless very useful to describe the current Belgian situation,
particularly in the Brussels-Capital Region (Jacobs 2000). Indeed, in the capital of
the European Union, management of cultural diversity has to take into account the
differential sources of the multicultural situation. On the one hand, Brussels is the
Belgian capital that has over time evolved from a Flemish city into a metropolis in
which French has become the lingua franca. To date, the capital is officially
bilingual (French and Dutch) and there are a set of institutional measures to ensure
political participation and power of both language groups. Brussels is thus heavily
marked by what could be called “multinational” politics (Gagnon and Tully 2001).
On the other hand, Brussels hosts a considerable number of foreign residents (over
25 per cent) and estimates are that 38–42 per cent of its inhabitants are of nonBelgian origin (taking into account only one generation as a point of reference).
There are, of course, also foreigners and foreign-origin citizens in the regions of
Flanders and Wallonia, but their numerical weight is less impressive. If we only
look at non-nationals, in Wallonia 10 per cent of the inhabitants are foreign
Alive and Kicking? Multiculturalism in Flanders
282
residents, of which the overall majority are nationals from other EU states. In
Flanders, immigrants without Belgian citizenship amount to nearly 5 per cent of
the population (with a larger proportion of non-EU citizens). Part of these
immigrants reject assimilation, want to maintain some of their ethnic particularity
and strive for partial public recognition of the new cultural diversity brought
through immigration. Issues dealing with this can be referred to by using
Kymlicka’s term of “polyethnic politics”. It is useful to make this distinction in the
Belgian context. In the remainder of this article I use the term “multiculturalism” to
refer to what Kymlicka has labelled “polyethnic politics”. In this section, however,
I first further discuss the institutional translation of the “multinational” component
of Belgian “multiculturalism”.
The federal system in Belgium is quite remarkable from a comparative perspective.
While in most federal states, the federated entities are territorial (Länder in
Germany, states in the United States), Belgium also has groups, called
“communities”, which are seen to be constitutive of the national federal state. As a
result, in principle only these “national” groups are officially recognised as
separate cultural entities and entitled to group differentiated rights. Nevertheless,
the Flemish have tended to grant special rights to immigrant-origin ethnic
minorities. The francophones have been reluctant to do so and even reject the
notion of ethnic minorities.
Belgium was formally a pure unitary state until 1970. The constitutional reforms of
1970, 1980 and 1988, however, gradually gave rise to a more diversified political
system, containing several subnational institutional levels (i.e. regions and
communities). The most important recent phase of this development was
constituted by the 1993 constitutional reform in which Belgium was officially
transformed into a federal state. The process of state reform has brought
recognition of cultural-linguistic diversity to the foreground as the guiding
principle for Belgian political life. The new constitution, indeed, clearly departs
from the postulate of a multination state (Kymlicka 1995) and recognises the rights
of (partial) self-determination of those groups that are seen to be the constitutive
elements of the Belgian nation (Martiniello 1997, 71). The constitution states that
the Flemish community and the French- and German-speaking groups are the
fundamental cultural communities of Belgium. This postulate then serves as the
basis for organisation of the entire Belgian political field. The Flemish/francophone
divide, however, clearly constitutes the central political axis.
Belgium is, however, not only officially built out of three communities (Dutchspeaking (i.e. Flemish community), French-speaking and German-speaking
communities), it is also officially the sum of three territorial entities, the so-called
regions (Flanders, Wallonia and the Brussels-Capital Region). The regions and
communities have specific political competencies. The regions have jurisdiction
over so-called “space-bounded” matters (such as infrastructure, economy, etc.),
while the communities have jurisdiction over so-called “person-related matters”
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Dirk Jacobs
(such as culture, language-use, education, etc.). The federal government takes care
of such matters as defence, finance, social security and justice. Although the
communities are not territorial entities, it is clearly delineated where they
geographically have jurisdiction. The Flemish Community exercises its powers in
the Flemish provinces and in Brussels. The French Community exercises its
powers in the Walloon provinces (with the exception of German-speaking
communes) and in Brussels. The German Community exercises its powers in the
communes of the province of Liège that form the German-language area.
Flanders, in the north of the country, is an official unilingual Dutch-speaking
region and Wallonia, in the south, is an official unilingual French-speaking region,
albeit that there is an officially recognised German-speaking area within the
Walloon region. In 2004, there were 6,016,024 inhabitants of Flanders and
3,380,498 inhabitants of Wallonia. Flanders and Wallonia (except its German
municipalities) are in principle (and respectively) unilingual Dutch and unilingual
French areas. Unilingualism here means that every contact of and with the state
must be done in the official language. Language use in non-state-related activities
is, however, free from formal regulations. To be entirely precise, it should be noted
that some Flemish and Walloon municipalities, so-called communes à facilités,
have an exceptional semi-bilingual status; francophone persons living in some
Flemish municipalities (and vice versa) are allowed to address (and have the right
to be addressed by) their local government in their own language. Finally, there are
special arrangements for German-speakers living in particular francophone
communities and for francophones living in the German-speaking areas.
The Brussels-Capital Region, geographically an enclave within the Flemish Region,
is an official bilingual (Dutch- and French-speaking) area, in which both Flemish
and francophone communities have jurisdiction. In 2004 it had 999,899 inhabitants,
of which well over a quarter have no Belgian citizenship. Of the Belgian
inhabitants of Brussels, approximately 15 per cent have Dutch – Flemish is
generally not considered to be a proper language – and 85 per cent have French as
their first language. Brussels hosts a considerable number of foreign residents
(29.4 per cent in 1998, 26.6 per cent in 2002). About half of the foreigners are EU
citizens, the other half are nationals of non-member countries. Of the latter, 50 per
cent are Moroccan. Of the three regions in Belgium, the Brussels-Capital Region in
proportional terms clearly hosts the largest number of foreign residents. It is
estimated that about 10 per cent of the Belgian citizens in Brussels are of foreign
origin (i.e. Belgians who acquired citizenship through jus soli, naturalisation or the
other systems for acquiring Belgian nationality).
Given the economic importance of Flanders within Belgium and a large proportion
of Flemish commuters, Dutch is an important language in Brussels, even though
only spoken by a minority of its inhabitants. Although the Flemish are clearly in a
minority position in Brussels, Dutch is officially used next to French as a fully
fledged official language. There is guaranteed political representation of the
Flemish in the Brussels regional parliament and government and there are a
Alive and Kicking? Multiculturalism in Flanders
284
number of incentives for political inclusion of the Flemish at local level. The
complex procedures to ensure this are the result of over three decades of difficult
negotiations and complex reforms.
Due to the procedures to institutionalise bilingualism in Brussels, the Flemish are
usually slightly over-represented in administrations. One can also fairly well claim
that the Flemish have more political power than could be expected on the basis of
their demographic importance. This advantageous situation for the Flemish in
Brussels is balanced by an advantageous situation for the francophones at national
level.
It will come as no surprise that this system of “parities” is vulnerable. The Flemish
parties have at recurring times, and especially in pre-election periods, all been
arguing for a minimal guaranteed political representation for the Flemish in
Brussels, while some francophone parties (in particular the Front Démocratique des
Francophones and the rightist Liberal Reformation Party) have been clearly
arguing to get rid of the special protections for the Flemish in the Brussels-Capital
Region (Jacobs 1999). In 2001, however, a deal was made in the so-called
Lambermont and Lombard agreements in which – briefly summarising – the
Flemish obtained partial guaranteed representation in exchange for additional
financial means for the francophone education system (Jacobs and Swyngedouw
2003). Another long-standing issue concerns the demand of the francophone
parties that French-speaking people living in the Flemish periphery of Brussels
would be granted more (special) rights. The Union Francophone and the Front
Démocratique des Francophones, in particular, openly strive for adhesion to the
bilingual Brussels-Capital Region of those municipalities of the Flemish periphery
of Brussels in which there are considerable numbers of francophones – the result of
processes of peri-urbanisation. The other francophone parties are more moderate
but do all suggest some kind of extension of the territory of the Brussels-Capital
Region or a special bilingual status for the municipalities currently endowed with
linguistic allowances (Jacobs 1999). With this in mind, francophone politicians
have made several efforts to convince the Council of Europe that the francophones
in the periphery of Brussels should be regarded as a national minority entitled to
special protection. For many Flemish politicians these demands are a thorn in their
side, as they are striving for complete unilingualism of the Flemish Region and
regard the demands of the francophones to transfer municipalities to the bilingual
Brussels-Capital Region as an unacceptable attack on Flemish territorial
sovereignty. Indeed, the Flemish officially even strive towards integration and
eventual language assimilation of all the region’s inhabitants, including the
francophones. As justification, historical agreements are referred to according to
which the language border was said to be fixed indefinitely.
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Dirk Jacobs
2. Multiculturalism in Flanders
The first systematic Flemish policy outline with regard to immigrants was
presented in 1990, shortly after the federal Royal Commissariat for Migrant Policy
(RCMP) was installed in 1989 to develop a coherent federal policy with regard to
immigrant incorporation. This Royal Commissariat had been created in direct
response to the rise of the Flemish extreme right-wing and racist party Vlaams
Blok, which had been able to score its first major successes, notably in local
elections in Antwerp where it gathered 18 per cent of the votes in 1988. In addition
to the blueprints developed by the RCMP, the Flemish government, dominated by
Christian democrats and socialists, developed its own policy plans for a “migrant
policy” (migrantenbeleid). While the topic of immigrant inclusion had before
merely been treated as an issue of welfare, it was now presented as a policy
problem for the entire Flemish government. For years to come, coordination would
remain in the hands of a Christian democratic minister in coalition governments, in
which socialists and Christian democrats were the main actors. The aim of the
Flemish migrant policy was said to be a “multicultural society with intercultural
exchange”. Distancing itself from the Vlaams Blok, the policy document
acknowledges the permanent presence of immigrants in Flanders. It is stated that
there is a need for a specific policy approach, with a double focus: on the one hand
attention to societal arrears, on the other hand attention to emancipation through
recognition of cultural identity. The policy starts from the postulate that there is not
yet a de facto multicultural society, but that such a society still has to be created. In
the migrant policy there is a clear preference for supporting self-organisations of
migrants who are willing to cooperate in federations and are coordinated by
quangos. In addition, a wide variety of local initiatives aimed at urban renewal and
integration of deprived groups in disadvantaged neighbourhoods – often explicitly
targeted towards particular immigrant groups – are being financed. In areas such as
health and childcare, the notion of ethno-cultural diversity is being introduced.
Most effort, however, is put into the education field with special subsidies for
schools with a high proportion of foreign-origin pupils, the development of
programmes for intercultural education, experiments with first-language education
and remedial trajectories for non-Dutch-speaking children from newly arrived
immigrants.
In the course of the 1990s it was felt that the spectrum of action had to be
broadened to refugees and travelling communities as well as “classic” immigrant
groups (De Vos 2001). This led to drafts of a so-called “strategic plan for minority
policy” in 1995, which was endorsed by the Flemish parliament a year later (De
Vos 2001; Verhoeven et al. 2003). The new Flemish “minorities’ policy” has three
basic components. First, there is the “policy for emancipation” aimed at full
participation in society of legally settled citizens of foreign origin and from
travelling groups. Second, there is the policy to facilitate integration for legal
newcomers. Third, there is the policy towards illegal residents in securing
minimum needs with regard to health care, welfare and education. The overarching
designation is changed from “migrants’ policy” to “minorities’ policy”, to mark the
Alive and Kicking? Multiculturalism in Flanders
286
inclusion of travelling communities. A wide variety of goals – and policy measures
to be taken to achieve these goals – are listed in the strategic plan.
In 1998, the Flemish government further formalised the new policy line through
the “minorities’ decree” (minderhedendecreet). In the decree the position of three
types of actor is clarified: the targeted groups; the Flemish government which is
responsible for the preparation, implementation and evaluation of the minorities’
policy; and the so-called “categorical sector” (integratiesector) – a number of
quangos – which is being delegated the tasks of developing local and subregional
policies for integration of the target groups and providing support for interest
representation by the groups themselves. Five target groups are distinguished:
allochthonous citizens (having one parent or grandparent born outside Belgium and
being in a position of societal arrears due to their ethnic origin or their weak socioeconomic situation), citizens with official refugee status, travelling groups, nonDutch-speaking newcomers and illegal residents (mensen zonder papieren). These
groups are referred to as “ethno-cultural minorities” (etnisch culturele
minderheden).
It is clear that the overarching policy framework is based on the recognition of
ethno-cultural groups, a notion copied from the situation in the Netherlands and
partly in line with Anglo-Saxon ideas of group-based “multicultural” policies
(Jacobs 2001; Verlot 2001). Notably, entire sections of policy documents
pertaining to the new minorities policy are copied from Dutch documents.
Although the Flemish government strives for a so-called “inclusive policy”
according to which diversity should be automatically taken into account in
whatever policy field, there is still ample room for “categorical policy” which is
specially (and exclusively) oriented towards foreign-origin groups. The support for
immigrant self-organisations testifies to the belief – which was equally imported
from the Netherlands – that preservation and development of their own cultural
identity among immigrants can stimulate emancipation within the host society. In
the same line of reasoning, room has been made for first-language education within
the Flemish education system. An important difference to the Netherlands system
is that there is no explicit recognition of particular ethnic communities (as, for
example, Moroccans or Turks) as “official” ethno-cultural minorities which should
be distinguished from each other, although this is often done in practice.
With the advent of a new Flemish government of socialists, greens and rightliberals in 1999, the minorities’ policy was not subject to major changes even
though, for the first time, Christian democrats no longer had a decisive say in the
matter. The ecologist minister who was charged with coordinating the minorities’
policy did, however, decide in 2002 that the strategic plan of 1996 should be
updated. An evaluation of the first strategic plan had shown that most of its good
intentions had not materialised in actual policy changes, let alone that any major
improvements had been achieved on the ground (Verhoeven et al. 2003). A new
strategic plan was proposed at the end of 2003 by the Flemish government, and
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was endorsed by the government in spring 2004 after it had been discussed with
representatives of the target groups and quangos active in the field. The new
strategic plan is as ambitious as the first one – and thus it remains to be seen
whether it will run the risk of remaining equally rhetorical rather than being
transformed into a variety of actual policy measures. The stress that is being laid on
the notion of “diversity” in the draft document of the strategic plan is striking.
The so-called “purple-green” Flemish government did, however, not limit itself to
mere bureaucratic planning and good intentions. A number of measures pertaining
to multicultural policy were actually undertaken. The most striking developments
were the preparations for state subsidising of mosques (payment of imams, costs of
buildings) from 2005 onwards – as is also done for churches and synagogues in
Belgium – and the granting of holidays on religious festivities for Jews and
Muslims in the Flemish education system. Consultation with immigrant
organisation representatives was furthermore intensified in several policy domains.
At the same time, however, the Flemish government has taken policy measures that
are said to be aimed at the “assimilation” of newcomers. Since the end of the 1990s
the Flemish have been preparing and experimenting with so-called citizenship
trajectories (inburgeringstrajecten) in which lessons on the Dutch language and
lessons of introduction to Flemish/Belgian society are to be taken by certain
categories of immigrant newcomers. The aim is to actively promote a certain
degree of language and cultural assimilation. This scheme, once again copied from
the Netherlands, has become compulsory for (most) non-EU newcomers in
Flanders from April 2004 onwards and optional in Brussels.
3. Flanders and the End of Multiculturalism
Toward Assimilation and Citizenship, a recent study edited by sociologists Joppke
and Morawska (2003), surveys a new trend in immigration studies: the turn away
from multicultural and postnational perspectives towards a renewed emphasis on
assimilation and citizenship. They claim that this is no coincidence as there is an
overall decline of official multiculturalism in European countries and in liberal
nation-states in general. Indeed, even in Sweden and the Netherlands, countries that
used to be fairly ambitious in this regard, multiculturalism is in crisis.
The authors make a distinction between “de facto multiculturalism” and “official
multiculturalism”. The former would be required by the logic of liberal states, the
latter implies a deliberate and explicit recognition and protection of immigrants as
distinct ethnic groups. Accommodation of religious differences, they consider,
epitomises the inevitable trend towards de facto multiculturalism in liberal states.
Official multiculturalism goes beyond de facto multiculturalism, they note, in
“engaging the state in the recognition and protection of immigrants as distinct
ethnic groups” (2003, 10). This distinction does not necessarily make our
assessment easier of whether a country (still) has a multicultural policy or not.
Indeed, recognition of distinct ethnic groups can be undertaken to different degrees
Alive and Kicking? Multiculturalism in Flanders
288
and might simultaneously take place in some fields but not in others. Furthermore,
it could be argued that de facto multiculturalism is of far more importance than
official multiculturalism if the latter is merely limited to rhetoric.
We could, of course, embark on a long debate on what precisely is to be
understood by “multiculturalism”, the difference between “de facto
multiculturalism” and “official multiculturalism” and whether “multiculturalism” is
an appropriate concept altogether (see Vermeulen and Slijper 2003). I prefer not to
go into this discussion in depth, but inevitably a number of decisions on
terminology and definition have to be made in order to be able to judge to what
extent the Flemish policy towards ethnic minorities should be regarded to (still) be
“multicultural”.
Vermeulen and Slijper (2003) stress that the ideology of multiculturalism has the
rejection of homogenisation and assimilation as its central tenet. They equally
claim that the ideology of multiculturalism has three central characteristics: (a) the
recognition of ethnic and cultural diversity; (b) the objective of social equality for
ethnically differentiated groups; and (c) the objective of social cohesion which is
best assured – according to multiculturalists – through recognition of ethnic and
cultural differences. Some multiculturalists want to preserve cultural diversity at all
costs – even if it hinders equality and cohesion – other multiculturalists applaud
cultural diversity in combination with open intercultural communication and reject
artificial and enforced preservation of cultural differences (Vermeulen and Slijper
2003). As far as I am concerned, I would label the former perspective as
“segregationist” and only the latter as “multicultural”.
For the purposes of this paper, I wish to consider the official recognition and
endorsement of ethnic and cultural diversity as the central characterising element
of policy that could be designated as being “multicultural”. Formulated in a less
abstract manner, this has a number of policy-making implications: (a) the notion of
ethnicity and/or ethno-cultural minorities is used to start with; (b) it is seen to be
acceptable and necessary that specific policy is developed for such ethnic
minorities; (c) ethnic minorities are allowed to maintain and develop their cultural
specificities; (d) host institutions are sensitive to this cultural diversity and – to the
extent that this is feasible – modify their procedures and practices in accordance;
and (e) ethnic minority groups are allowed and stimulated to organise themselves
on an ethnic basis – amongst other things for interest representation. Although
Flanders has (moderate) assimilationist ambitions with its citizenship trajectories,
the overall picture in my opinion still fairly justifies labelling Flemish policy as
oriented towards multiculturalism.
Clearly, Flanders – like the Netherlands (Entzinger 2003) – today has a hybrid
policy towards immigrant incorporation, combining both more assimilationist and
more multiculturalist stances. This is the result of a political struggle between
defenders of a more assimilationist model and proponents of a more
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multiculturalist model (and those in between). Such a struggle can lead to hybrid
results, as is now the case in the Netherlands and Flanders, especially as we are
dealing with coalition governments. Integration policy is indeed not the result of a
grand national consensus with regard to immigrant integration and citizenship,
which is inherently coherent, but is the result of a political struggle in which there
are winners and losers, and in which compromises are being made. In most
European countries the proponents of cultural diversity are, perhaps temporarily,
on the losing side. It seems too early, however, to claim that multiculturalism has
been replaced once and for all by assimilationism. In any event, in Flanders the
more multicultural logic is still in place and has even been strengthened.
The idea of multiculturalism does not go uncontested in Flanders but it has not
(yet?) been so deeply discredited and questioned as in the Netherlands. I see a
number of reasons for this.
First, “progressive” left-wing forces have continuously remained in power and
have kept defending the stress on recognition of diversity. They have remained in
power because the party landscape and the proportional electoral system only
allows for multiparty governments of a limited number of possible coalitions – at
least as long as all other parties keep on boycotting the extreme-right Vlaams Blok.
In addition, they have kept defending the stress on diversity in the minorities’
policy as there is fierce competition on the left of the political spectrum for the
same type of voter, who is very sensitive to positive rhetoric with regard to
diversity, clearly distancing themselves from the extreme-right xenophobic stance.
Second, in the context of the competition between Flemish and francophones in the
Brussels-Capital Region, the recognition and promotion of ethno-cultural diversity
could have an added instrumental value in safeguarding the influence of the
Flemish community and the de facto importance of the Dutch language in the
Belgian capital. This provides an additional incentive to uphold the logic of
stressing diversity in the Flemish minorities’ policy. In the following section I
discuss the latter explanation before looking into the transformations of the
Flemish political landscape.
4. Competing Flemish-Francophone Approaches towards Immigrants
As has been suggested, there are a number of striking differences between the
Flemish and francophone approaches towards immigrants in Belgium. Over the last
decade, Flemish governments have had a clear preference for supporting selforganisations of migrants, as noted above. Moreover, consultation of immigrant
organisation representatives has become good practice in several policy domains.
This is much less the case on the francophone side. Organisations furthermore
encounter huge difficulties if they seek francophone subsidies and profile
themselves as being “immigrant” or “ethnic”. On the Flemish side, being an ethnic
organisation can be rather advantageous in obtaining government support.
Throughout the 1990s, consecutive Flemish governments have financially
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supported initiatives in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. These programmes were
often targeted explicitly towards immigrant groups. Such a targeted approach
towards immigrants has only been adopted by the Flemish governments in Belgium,
in contrast to the francophone governments that have deliberately opted not to
develop any categorical policy towards immigrant groups – at least not officially.
The francophone side, furthermore, has until now not been prepared to gather any
“ethnic” data and is reluctant to allow modification of federal data-gathering and
data-presentation procedures with regard to immigrant presence in the country. On
the Flemish side, however, in a number of policy domains alternative statistics on
ethnic background have been created, faced with the impossibility of distinguishing
ethnic groups in federal data except on the basis of nationality. Whereas
headscarves are actively discouraged or forbidden in the francophone education
system, the Flemish schools have taken a much more pragmatic attitude. These are
but a few examples to illustrate that Flanders is taking a completely different stance
towards the presence of immigrant groups than the francophone part of Belgium.
The main differences in the Flemish and francophone policies towards immigrants
and ethnic minorities are schematically represented in Table 1. Although the
Flemish and francophone policies towards immigrants and ethnic minorities can be
fitted into this general typology, it should be borne in mind that different
dimensions can be stressed in specific policy subfields and government agencies –
for example depending on the ideology of the minister responsible (given the fact
that Belgium always has coalition governments).
Table 1. Flemish and Francophone Policy Approaches towards People of
Immigrant Origin
Flemish
approach
Francophone
approach
Policy emphasis for
integration of settled
immigrants
• recognition of the
existence of ethnocultural minority
groups
• cooperation with
and support of
immigrant selforganisation
• individual approach
• only indirect
targeting of
immigrant groups
(e.g. in certain
neighbourhoods)
Policy for
newcomers
Foreign inspiration
Citizenship
trajectories
(including
compulsory
language courses)
Anglo-Saxon and
Dutch ideas of groupbased “multicultural”
policies
None
French
assimilationistrepublican model
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Dirk Jacobs
The Flemish approach, with its recognition of ethnic minorities, has already been
presented. Intellectually influenced by the individualist republican model of France,
the francophone and Walloon governments have not been willing to recognise
ethno-cultural groups as specific entities in their policies towards immigrants.
Furthermore, although in practice often primarily directed towards immigrant
groups, initiatives to fight societal arrears were often framed in such a way that
immigrants were not specifically defined as target groups. Nor is there any special
programme for newcomers on the francophone side.
Owing to the complex institutional framework of the Belgian federal political
system, both the Flemish and francophone communities have jurisdiction with
regard to policies concerning immigrants or ethnic minority groups in the BrusselsCapital Region. As a result, two contradicting policy approaches coexist within the
same territory.
This being said, it should be pointed out that the difference between the Flemish
and francophone approach for dealing with polyethnic issues is very much
interconnected with, and instrumental to, strategies used by the political
establishment of both linguistic groups as contenders in the political field of
Brussels (Jacobs 2000). Their divergent positions on integration policy allow them
to protect and reinforce their respective positions in the multinational political
arena. In addition to opening its education system in Brussels to all potential pupils
(and thus now hosting about one-third of all children) and stimulating multilingual
cultural events, the Flemish community has for example made substantial efforts to
woo immigrant associations in Brussels. It is no exaggeration to denounce these
activities as at least partially strategic attempts of the Flemish government in
Brussels to incorporate immigrant (often francophone) self-organisations into its
policy networks, thus hoping to strengthen the sphere of influence of the Flemish
community within the Brussels-Capital Region. Immigrant associations, of course,
welcome the Flemish efforts as interesting new possibilities for funding and
lobbying. On the francophone side, the Flemish efforts are looked at with some
suspicion and are sometimes regarded to be “imperialist” on the part of the Flemish
(who tend to have greater financial means than the francophones). A significant
number of francophone politicians stress that, on the contrary, assimilation of
immigrants into French culture is in their own best interest. They rely on their
dominant position within Brussels and the status of French as lingua franca leading
to (automatic) immigrant incorporation. It often seems that by denying the
existence of ethnic minority groups, the francophones equally hope to downgrade
the legitimacy of Flemish demands for their own differentiated rights and special
representation.
Favell and Martiniello (1998) have correctly pointed out that this peculiar
multilevel governance situation in Brussels allows and encourages new types of
immigrant opportunity and political voice. Indeed, immigrant associations can now,
to give but one example, go “shopping” for funding and influence in either the
Flemish or francophone community and can strategically opt for different forms of
Alive and Kicking? Multiculturalism in Flanders
292
collective mobilisation – stressing either ethnic identity or neutral forms of social
insertion (Jacobs and Swyngedouw 2002). As a result of the francophone approach,
many immigrants are active within the structures of existing social organisations
(trade unions, etc.) and anti-racist organisations. The fact that migrant associations
are treated as legitimate partners for discussion and policy initiatives by the
Flemish authorities has, however, also enhanced the creation of self-organisations
and processes of ethnic mobilisation.
Politicians from both the Flemish and francophone establishments hope that
immigrants in Brussels will in the end become respectively Flemish or francophone.
Both see their (parallel) education systems in the Brussels-Capital Region as an
important instrument towards this goal. Nevertheless, all research (Swyngedouw et
al. 1999; Janssens 2001; Jacobs and Swyngedouw 2002), both quantitative and
qualitative, shows that until now most of the “new Belgians” and immigrant groups
do not want to choose. Even though many of the immigrant population will have
better knowledge of French and are de facto francophone, interestingly, this is not
necessarily experienced as a political identity as well (Jacobs and Swyngedouw
2002). Apparently the omnipresence of the bipolar institutional structure does not
(yet?) force immigrants to take sides at the level of identity. This is an incentive for
the Flemish political establishment to continue its efforts in building alliances with
foreign-origin groups. Stressing their multicultural stance and advocating a
multicultural future orientation for Brussels – in contrast to the assimilationist
position of the francophone political elite – the Flemish political establishment
hopes to further strengthen their sphere of influence in the Brussels-Capital Region.
It should be noted that by “Flemish establishment” I refer to all Flemish parties –
which have all been in power at some point on the federal and Flemish level and
are currently all jointly in power in Brussels in a large anti-Vlaams Blok coalition –
except the Vlaams Blok, which is the largest Flemish party in Brussels in electoral
terms.
This strategic positioning was clearly illustrated in a recent large-scale
advertisement campaign “Vlamingen. Partners in Brussel” (through billboards,
radio spots and brochures in several languages), aimed at improving the image of
the Flemish community – to counter the association made between everything
Flemish and the extreme-right-wing and racist party Vlaams Blok – among
immigrant inhabitants of Brussels.
5. Transformations of the Flemish Political Landscape
Apart from the instrumental value of the multicultural stance in the context of
competition within the Brussels-Capital Region, another, more important reason
for the survival of “multiculturalism” in Flanders is to be found in transformations
of the Flemish political landscape. The last two decades have seen the advent of
new political cleavages in Flanders, in the face of the weakening importance of
more classic political cleavages. In post-war Belgium there were three dominant
293
Dirk Jacobs
(cross-cutting) political cleavages: the classic left/right labour/capital or
workers/employers cleavage, the philosophical cleavage between Roman Catholics
and atheists, and the linguistic cleavage between francophones and Flemings. Apart
from Brussels and its periphery, the linguistic cleavage has lost much of its
electoral importance due to devolution and to distinct subnational political schemes.
The Catholic/atheist philosophical and religion-related cleavage has also lost
importance following a number of institutionalised compromises (notably in
education policy) and the sharp decline in religious denominations. Last but not
least, with the development of the welfare state, the fall of the Iron Curtain, and of
the rise of “third-way” political discourses, the workers/employers cleavage has
also lost some of its importance. After a period of ardent neoliberalism in the 1980s
and early 1990s, Belgian liberal parties have at the dawn of the new millennium
tried to reposition themselves at the centre of the political spectrum and have again
taken up support for state-regulated capitalism. The Flemish Socialist Party has
partly embraced the third-way discourse, thus dropping a number of hard-line leftwing positions on the capitalist system, and are favouring moderate state-controlled
market regulation. Empirical evidence suggests that while the importance of the
classic political cleavages is weakening in the political landscape, two new
associated cleavages are emerging (Swyngedouw 1992, 1998). On one side there is
the materialist/post-materialist cleavage; on the other side, but not perpendicular to
the other, the ethnocentrist/multiculturalist cleavage has appeared. Two new
political actors have come on stage alongside these new cleavages, stressing issues
that had remained marginal in the old political landscape, which was structured by
the three classic cleavages. On the one hand, the Ecologist Party has seen growing
electoral success throughout the 1980s and 1990s by stressing environmental issues
and taking a number of postmaterialist stances. On the other hand, an extreme
right-wing party with clear anti-immigrant and materialistic stances has occupied a
place in the political field. In response, the Ecologist Party has adopted a clear proimmigrant and pro-diversity stance. The traditional political parties have long
remained hesitant in both domains.
Immigrant incorporation is one of the main issues – other issues pertain to ecology,
self-determination (gay rights, euthanasia, etc.) and law and order – over which
political position-taking helps to (re)structure the new political landscape in the
face of the diminishing importance of classic political cleavages in structuring
voting behaviour. Survey research (Billiet et al. 2001) has clearly shown that a
clear distinction can be made of the overall value preferences of the electorates of
the ecologists on the one hand and the extreme right on the other, with the
traditional parties in between. These findings support the thesis of new political
cleavages in which the ethnocentrism/multiculturalism divide and the
materialist/postmaterialist divide are together of central importance.
The ongoing support for more multicultural stances on immigrant incorporation
policy throughout the 1990s and at the beginning of the new millennium might has
to be interpreted in the light of a repositioning of political parties with regard to the
two above-mentioned cleavages, in the face of weakening differences between
Alive and Kicking? Multiculturalism in Flanders
294
political parties on the classic socio-economic and ideological-religious divides on
the one hand, and the growing concerns about immigrant incorporation and the
development of post-materialist values on the other. It may be argued that the
socialists are trying to (re)position themselves on the multiculturalist and
postmaterialist side of the spectrum in order to compete with the ecologists. The
workers’ faction of the Christian Democratic Party is pleading to do the same, but
is challenged by another faction within the party that wants to take an
assimilationist-materialist position. The more conservative faction among the
Christian democrats would thus rather compete with the assimilationist-materialist
position of the liberals. The latter, for their part, tend to take up mildly ethnocentric
discourses to compete with the clear anti-immigrant ethnocentric stance of the
extreme right. But also among the liberals there is a more multicultural faction
present and active.
Overall, both socialists, greens and Christian democrats have kept defending the
stress on diversity in the minorities’ policy because there is a fierce competition on
the left of the political spectrum for the same type of voter. This particular voter
tends to be urban and highly educated, is very sensitive to the discourse of diversity
and clearly rejects an extreme-right xenophobic point of view. The last decade has
seen significant swings back and forth between the socialists and the greens (and to
a lesser extent the Christian democrats) of voters for whom precisely the topic of
immigrant incorporation is of considerable importance. The socialists have in
recent years clearly decided to take a more multiculturalist – or at least prodiversity – stance in trying to win the competition with the greens for these
progressive voters, rather than trying to reclaim “old”, and on average lessereducated, categories of voters who are more inclined to take an assimilationist or
even an ethnocentric point of view. The Christian Democratic Party may be
internally divided as to what political position to take in this respect and when the
party was in opposition one faction was pleading to introduce more assimilationist
elements in the immigrant incorporation regime – such as citizenship trajectories.
At the same time, however, it has kept defending the overall logic of existing
policy schemes – and its more multicultural elements – relating to immigrant
incorporation, as it is in large part a political legacy of its own. In addition, the
Christian democrats are firmly embedded in a number of quangos which play a role
in implementing and coordinating policy at local and subregional levels. As either
socialists and Christian democrats or socialists and greens have been part of the
ruling government in the last decade, “progressive” left-wing forces have
continuously remained in power and have kept defending the stress on recognition
of diversity. To a large extent, they have been in power and are quite likely to
remain in power because the party landscape and the proportional electoral system
only allows for multiparty governments of a limited number of possible coalitions
– given the fact that all other parties as a matter of moral principle have kept on
rejecting the idea of a government in which the extreme-right Vlaams Blok would
participate. As long as this remains the case and there is competition between leftist
295
Dirk Jacobs
and centre-leftist parties to appeal to the same type of electorate, the future of a
multicultural approach towards immigrant incorporation is assured.
This, however, might rapidly change. In the June 2004 regional elections, the
extreme-right party Vlaams Blok was able to attain almost 25 per cent of the vote
in Flanders and has become the second largest party in the Flemish parliament. The
Flemish greens only partly recovered from a deep crisis after having lost all the
party’s federal members of parliament after a catastrophic result – and the
introduction of an electoral threshold on which they agreed themselves – in the last
national elections (May 2003). Although the Socialist Party did not achieve its
ambitions to retain the former ecologist voters in the 2004 regional Flemish
elections, the Green Party is still weak. The greens therefore decided not to join a
leftist government, thus forcing Christian democrats, liberals and socialists to
together constitute the new Flemish government in an anti-Vlaams Blok coalition.
The green opposition on its left wing will most probably assure that the socialists
will stick to the defence of a multicultural incorporation regime. Given the huge
electoral success of the Vlaams Blok – which changed its name to ‘Vlaams Belang’
(Flemish Interest) in November 2004 following a conviction in court for its racist
propaganda - and an internally divided Christian Democratic Party that tries to be a
catch-all, other scenarios can, however, no longer be ruled out. If the new Flemish
government would somewhere along the line decide to focus on law and order and
assimilation – as some have been arguing for both in the Liberal Party as in the
Christian Democratic Party in the light of the competition with Vlaams Blok (now
rebaptised as ‘Vlaams Belang’) – this would threaten the existing logic of the
minorities’ policy. Furthermore, in the event of a governmental crisis and a – at the
moment still unlikely – subsequent breach of the so-called cordon sanitaire (an
agreement between all other parties not to join forces in a coalition with the
Vlaams Blok due to its right-wing populist and racist policies), a policy change
would occur. Indeed, an alternative coalition government in which the Vlaams
Belang (ex-Vlaams Blok) would participate, would certainly imply the end of
multicultural policy. Last but not least, if Vlaams Belang one day is able to obtain
an unassailable position thanks to ongoing electoral success, this also would mean
the end of multiculturalism in Flanders. The next Flemish regional elections are to
be held in 2009.
6. Conclusion
In recent years the importance of ethnic identity and multicultural initiatives seems
to have been strengthened in Flemish immigrant incorporation policy. Flanders
thus contradicts the claim that we are witnessing the end of multiculturalism in
Europe. Two reasons can be analytically distinguished to understand why Flanders
is “still” embracing the idea of multiculturalism as the recognition and protection
of immigrants as distinct ethnic groups. First and foremost, the transformation of
the Flemish political landscape, in which issues pertaining to immigrant
incorporation are of central importance, accounts for the resilience of the idea and
practice of multiculturalism in Flemish policy-making. Due to a rather fragmented
Alive and Kicking? Multiculturalism in Flanders
296
party landscape (with no party gaining more than 27 per cent of the votes) and a
proportional representation system, only a limited number of multiparty coalition
governments are possible. These have, until now, always included left-wing forces
that have kept defending the multicultural elements in Flemish immigrant
incorporation policy. Second, the multicultural model has been able to survive due
to the intertwining of issues linked to immigrant incorporation, on the one hand,
and multinational politics, on the other, in the context of the Brussels-Capital
Region. The more multicultural stances are seen to have instrumental value in
trying to secure and enlarge the influence of the Flemish community in the
bilingual Brussels-Capital Region. There is no guarantee that multiculturalism will
survive in Flanders. Nor is it bound to disappear. All depends on electoral results
and the strategic reactions of political parties in coping with these results.
Note
*An extended version of this paper was presented at the session “The end of
multiculturalism?” at the 2004 Conference of Europeanists, organised by the
Council for European Studies (political science) and held in Chicago, March 2004.
The author wishes to thank Jonathan Laurence, Boris Slijper, Paul Statham and
Marc Swyngedouw.
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About the Author
Dirk Jacobs is associate professor (chargé de cours) in sociology at the Université
Libre de Bruxelles (Francophone university) and assistant professor at the
Katholieke Universiteit Brussel (Flemish university). Until 30 september 2004
Jacobs was postdoctoral researcher of the National Fund for Scientific Research
(FWO), Flanders (Belgium) at the Institute of Social and Political Opinion
Research (ISPO) of Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (University of Leuven); email:
dirk.jacobs@ulb.ac.be
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Alive and Kicking? Multiculturalism in Flanders
Appendix
Table 2. Election Results for the Brussels-Capital Region, 1995 and 1999
ECOLO
PRL-FDF
PS
PSC
VIVANT
FN
FNB
Total
French
VL.BLO
K
CVP
VLDVU-O
VLD
VU
SP-AGA
SP
AGALEV
Total
Flemish
% 1999
% 1995
Seats
1995
7
28
17
7
86.4
Seats
1999
14
27
13
6
1
2
1
64
18.3
34.4
16
7.9
1.5
2.6
1.3
86
9
35
21.4
9.3
4.5
3
3.3
3.2
3.3
7.5
65
Votes
1999
77 969
146 845
68 307
33 815
6 431
11 204
5 528
366 195
356 231
4
2
19 310
12 507
3
2
3
14 284
13 729
13 586
2.7
1.4
3.1
14.1
6
2
1
2
2.4
0.9
13.7
11
Votes
1995
37 308
144 478
88 370
38 244
30 803
11 034
5 726
13 223
2
0
10
60 546
9 987
3 906
56 746
Table 3. Results in Flemish Regional Elections, 1999
CVP
VLD
Vlaams Blok
SP
AGALEV
VU-ID
UF
Votes
857 732
855 867
603 345
582 419
451 361
359 226
36 683
%
22.1
22
15.5
15
11.6
9.3
0.9
Seats
28
27
20
19
12
11
1
299
Dirk Jacobs
Table 4. Results in Flanders for Federal Elections, 1995, 1999 and 2003
CD&V
VLD
Vlaams Blok
SP.A-Spirit
AGALEV
N-VA
% 1995
27.3
20.8
12.2
19.9
7
–
% 1999
22.6
22.7
15.4
15.7
11.3
–
% 2003
21.4
24.4
18.1
24.3
4
4.9
Table 5. Results in Flemish Regional Elections, 2004
CD&V-NVA
VLD
Vlaams Blok
SP.a-Spirit
Groen!
UF
Votes
1 060 580
804 578
981 587
799 325
308 898
43 391
%
26.1
19.8
24.2
19.6
7.6
1.1
Seats
35
25
32
25
6
1
Notes: In recent years, a number of Flemish parties have changed their name and/or
have merged or formed alliances with other parties. CD&V (Christian democrats)
were formerly called CVP; SP (Socialist Party) has changed its name to SP.A
(Social Progressive Alternative Party) and has formed a cartel with Spirit. Spirit
and N-VA (New Flemish Alliance) are the result of a split of the moderate Flemish
nationalist party VU (People’s Union, not shown). VLD are the liberal democrats.
AGALEV is the Green Party and has recently changed its name to Groen! UF is
the Union Francophone.
The Management of Multiculturalism:
Coming to Terms with the Multiplication of
Experienced Difference
HANS SIEBERS
Tilburg University
Multiculturalism, understood as the multiplication of experienced
difference, is today at the forefront of social transformation. It entails
opportunities and risks, but how can we deal with these, especially the
latter? This paper sketches a framework for understanding these risks
in terms of both extrapolated fragmentation and fundamentalist
reactions. Moreover, drawing on some of the main writers involved,
the main positions in the political and theoretical debate about
multiculturalism are discussed to assess their contributions to
developing a management principle for dealing with these risks. These
positions are neoliberalism, egalitarian liberalism, communitarianism
and deliberative democracy. However, it is shown that, for different
reasons, none of these positions is able to provide encompassing and
convincing answers to the challenge posed by these risks. A
differential and contextualised approach is called for in which
elements from these positions may be applied fruitfully. Nevertheless,
this paper serves to demonstrate the need for further reflection and
indicates the main issues on the agenda.
C
ultural difference appears at the forefront of world affairs and public opinion
and has become associated with problems of multicultural society in many
parts of the world. In my home town in the Netherlands an Islamic school was set
on fire a few days after the Twin Towers and Pentagon disaster. This event
received massive media coverage. A popular Dutch politician running for
parliament in the 2002 elections called for a “cold war on Islam” and tried to
mobilise votes based on a campaign against “foreigners”. He was shot nine days
before the elections took place. In Germany discussions about a so-called
Leitkultur have excited politicians and public opinion. Recent events in the
Balkans, Central Africa, Guatemala and Indonesia show that multiculturalism has
become the global/local theatre in which current problems of social transformation
and contradiction are performed. Or does multiculturalism itself constitute the heart
of these problems?
International Journal on Multicultural Societies (IJMS), Vol. 6, No. 2, 2004: 300 - 321
ISSN 1817-4574, www.unesco.org/shs/ijms/vol6/issue2/art6 © UNESCO
301
Hans Siebers
Appearance and reality are difficult to distinguish in this respect. Of course
problems of multiculturalism are related to unequal access to resources and to
problems of political and economic inequality and interests. However, this does not
mean that problems of multiculturalism would be a mere reflection of the “real”
problems in some economic and political “infrastructure”. Cultural problems have
their own relatively autonomous dynamics. In short, a clear conceptualisation of
the problems raised by the term multiculturalism is called for, as well as the need
for operationalising and contextualising such conceptualisation in each specific
case. Cultural issues must be embedded within a wider framework of political and
economic questions.
The very fact that these issues are at the forefront of scientific and policy agendas
indicates the urgent need for rethinking and elaborating, not only on the problems
associated with cultural difference and multiculturalism themselves, but also on the
management principles and models which inspire current ways of dealing with
these problems. Current management interventions and policies not only differ
considerably from one place to another, they also tend to build upon rather
conventional ways of thinking about society and management. There is a strong
need for innovative thinking in this respect, but such an innovation will have to
start from a critical scrutiny of the assumptions behind existing ways of managing
multiculturalism.
The objective of this paper is to contribute to these challenges. First, I discuss the
concept of multiculturalism and call for its redefinition in terms of the
multiplication of experienced difference. Second, a framework is sketched for
understanding the consequences of this multiplication of experienced difference in
terms of the relationship between the difference/sameness problem and relations of
socio-economic and political inequality. Third, the main risks of this multiplication
of experienced difference are identified in terms of both extrapolated fragmentation
and fundamentalist reactions. Fourth, drawing on some of the main writers
involved, the main positions in the political and theoretical debate about
multiculturalism are discussed in order to assess their contributions to developing a
management principle for dealing with these risks. These positions are
neoliberalism, egalitarian liberalism, communitarianism and deliberative
democracy.
1. Multiculturalism Revisited
In the literature, the historical factors that shape the emergence of multiculturalism
are coined as “globalisation” and “fragmentation”. Globalisation (Robertson 1992)
is a complex and multi-layered process, but the principle that stands at its roots is
about time/space compression. It refers to the fact that flows of people, goods,
capital, finance, commodities, images, symbols, technology and information
increasingly span the globe (Appadurai 1996; Hannerz 1992, 1996). Distant
localities are linked in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events
The Management of Multiculturalism
302
occurring elsewhere, and vice versa. Social relations become disembedded, that is,
they are increasingly “lifted out” of the context of local interaction (Giddens 1990).
As a result, any framework of rather circumscribed and relatively closed
communities in which the life-worlds and identity formations of individuals are
embedded, is challenged. Such frameworks can no longer be taken for granted – if
they ever could be – they are under threat of becoming fragmented. This holds true
not only for primordial communities such as villages, neighbourhoods and kinship
lines, but also for “imagined communities” (Anderson 1987) such as nations. The
coincidence of geographic and social space can no longer be taken for granted (van
Binsbergen 1999). The model of the nation-state in which were closely articulated
the rule of law, the granting of political and social rights, the institutions for
democratic participation and cultural belonging to a national community, is under
threat. Overall grand narratives, such as those of good society, progress,
development and emancipation, which used to cluster and coordinate the thinking
and practice of large numbers of individuals in large parts of the world, fostered by
the state, are losing their credibility (Bauman 1993, 1995).
Regarding the effects of globalisation and fragmentation, there is much discussion
(see also Spickard 1999). We may assume that due to globalisation contemporary
people are increasingly facing and experiencing cultural difference and different
cultural influences, whereas fragmentation undermines their idea of relatively safe
and stable embeddedness in cultural, economic, social and political institutions.
The combined effects of both trends create problems of uncertainty, insecurity,
anxiety and identity challenges. These problems and challenges are often
associated with the term multiculturalism. This term feeds into the popular image
of society as a mosaic of a number of “cultures” that exist side by side, thus
narrowing down these problems and challenges to the question of how to create
peaceful and cohesive relations between these “cultures”. Selectively drawing from
anthropology, an answer to this question has been found highlighting the concept
of cultural relativism. “Cultures” are supposed to be understood here only in their
own particular terms, thus undermining any ground on which cultural comparison
can take place.1
If cultural comparison is ruled out, cultural critique will suffer the same fate. Of
course, the concept of cultural relativism has played a crucial role in criticising and
bringing down colonial, ethnocentric and hierarchical approaches to the “cultures”
of non-Western groups, but at the same time it has stipulated a discourse of
political correctness in which any critical encounter with any practice of “the
other” has become virtually impossible. The moment “the other” is located at the
other side of the cultural divide and understood as a representative of a specific
1
The mosaic image draws not only on cultural relativism, but also on the mode of
pillarisation that structured pluralism in such countries as the Netherlands from the end of
the nineteenth century until the 1960s (Riis 1999). See also Davie (1999) on “pluralism
of communities” and Champion (1999) on “communitarian pluralism”.
303
Hans Siebers
“culture”, that can only be understood in its own terms, any critique on their
practices or ideas will not only undermine the cultural relativist foundation on
which peaceful relations between “cultures” in multicultural society are based, it
will also call into question the very legitimacy of their existence in society as far as
this legitimacy is based on being a representative of a specific “culture”. As a
consequence, efforts by for example Norwegian state officials to intervene on
behalf of migrants’ daughters who are forced into marriage against their will have
thus become very difficult out of respect for “their culture” and out of fear of being
accused of being racists, as Unna Wikan (2002) demonstrates. She discusses
several cases in which the need for intervention to safeguard respect for human
rights clashes with the requirement of political correctness to abstain from
criticising “the other’s culture”.
Such clashes are not only due to the application of the concept of cultural
relativism, but also to an unproblematic and uncritical use of the concept of
“culture” as such. As the literature on globalisation and fragmentation
demonstrates, individual people cannot simply be understood as members or
representatives of “cultures”. Current trends within anthropology (Kuper 1999) and
sociology (Featherstone 1995) tell us that there are no (longer, if ever the case)
such “things” as holistically, systemically and statically conceived “cultures” that
nicely coincide with particular communities, groups or nations and that are able to
flourish and develop within clearly circumscribed and delimited borders. By and
large, the mosaic image of multiculturalism maintains such an outdated idea of
“culture” and assumes such a notion of clearly circumscribed borders between
them. It may cause no surprise that the moment such critique across these
“borders” and vis-à-vis “the other” becomes unavoidable, the continuous use of
such an outdated notion of “culture” may provide the discursive groundwork for
swinging to the other extreme, i.e. the emergence of cultural fundamentalism as a
hegemonic way of conceiving and dealing with the problems and challenges
discussed above. Thus “culture” may come to play a similar exclusionary role as
“race” did in earlier epochs (Stolcke 1995).
We must not forget that “culture” is a concept. It is used to understand reality “out
there”, which does not mean that this reality must necessarily be understood in this
term. Other terms may be applied to understand processes of meaning-making and
to conceive of the ways people constitute and position themselves in the world.
Consequently, I propose to leave behind the concept of “culture” and would like to
reframe multiculturalism as the problems and challenges of uncertainty, insecurity,
anxiety and identification raised by the multiplication of experienced difference as
a consequence of the combined effects of globalisation and fragmentation. These
problems and challenges focus on two interrelated issues, difference itself and
related inequality.
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2. Difference and Inequality
Difference and its opposite, sameness, refer to the ways individuals and groups are
constituted that include both internal or mental and external or social dimensions.
Sameness alludes to a situation in which the individual is embedded in a single
community. In this situation there is a relation of sameness between the traits of the
individual and the community as well as between the various understandings the
individual cherishes about him- or herself. Difference, by contrast, points to a
condition in which each individual is related to a plurality of groups which
problematises each particular relation. None of these relations can be taken for
granted and each individual deals with this plurality of social relations in terms of
multiple identifications, i.e. not necessarily a coherent set of identifications and
understandings of him- or herself (Sökefeld 1999).
The degree of mental and social integration or fragmentation is at stake here. I hold
that, as a result of globalisation and fragmentation, the idea of embedded sameness
not only becomes unrealistic, but whether it is desirable is also very questionable.
After all, sameness in its pure appearance represents a submission of individuals to
collective structures and interests, allowing for little individual space of manoeuvre
in both mental and social respects. As a reaction to globalisation and
fragmentation, the multiple interests, understandings and identifications of
individuals may become subordinated to one single dominant social category and
identification propagated by fundamentalist movements. These movements may be
underscored by regional or religious persuasion, but also by highlighting
primordialism and subsequently turn into ethno-nationalist movements (DíezMedrano 2002). The accounts of these movements, currently often framed in
cultural terms, tend to become sacralised within this process, i.e. positioned beyond
any reasonable scrutiny (see also Spickard 1999). Such accounts not only
subordinate individuals to larger interests, they may also drive them collectively
into aggression and violence.
At the other extreme, idea-typical difference in its extreme form cannot but end up
in atomisation of society and individual isolation. It undermines any stable
identification or group membership. The atomisation of society may entail the
emergence of internally conflictive individuals who find it very difficult to create
any stable social relationships and groups. Boosting individuality,2 their mental and
discursive basis for developing any direction in the constitution of self and any
orientation as a moral person may be threatened thus invoking images of what
2 Spickard (1999) creates an opposition between universalist human rights thinking and various
fundamentalisms, such as ethnic, nationalist and religious movements, both as consequences of
globalisation, the increasing division of labour and the communications revolution. Although he
dresses up both in religious terms, he obviously favours the former while abhorring the latter. Thus
he fails to see another risk or danger stemming from globalisation next to fundamentalism, i.e.
extrapolated fragmentation and anomie. In my view, his positive treatment of individuality and
individuation mystifies or denies this lurking danger.
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Durkheim (1893) has epitomised as ‘anomie’, a state of lawlessness and moral
deficiency and confusion. Post-modern celebrations of short-lived kicks, sensations
and sentimental rages are blind to exactly these problematic sides of heightened
individuality with the continuously lurking dangers of burn-out.
Both variants, the former fundamentalist reaction variant as well as the latter
extreme extrapolated fragmentation variant, are far from politically neutral.
Political interests lurk behind efforts to promote individualisation or even
atomisation. For example, individualisation of labour relations finds a strong
impetus in the spread of human resource management in Western companies,
delegitimising the collective protection of labour interests (Storey 1995). Examples
of political interests at stake in the fundamentalist variant abound. The political
struggle around terrorism, for example, is a fertile breeding ground for
fundamentalist statements. The mingling of the problems and challenges of the
multiplication of experienced difference with political interests and struggle
seriously adds to the risks and dangers involved. Things are made even more
complicated when socio-economic inequalities fuel this struggle and when the
outcome from this struggle brings about a further deepening of these inequalities.
In short, the difference/sameness problem must be understood in its relationship
with inequalities, both in political and economic terms.
3. In Search of Management Principles
To be sure, the risks of these variants of extrapolated fragmentation and
fundamentalism emanating from the uncertainty, insecurity, anxiety and identity
challenges fomented by globalisation and fragmentation may not everywhere be as
urgent as suggested. These extreme forms of entanglement of difference/sameness
and inequality may not be dominant in each and every society. In my view there is
a middle ground between the two extremes in which it is possible to strike a
flexible balance between individual and society, between alienation and
submission. Here options for viable socialisation, individual development,
participatory institutions, democracy and equitable economic change may remain
open. Moreover, globalisation and fragmentation may not be completely new
phenomena. There are good arguments to go back to at least the colonialist
expansion from the sixteenth century onwards when tracing the origins of
globalisation. Even more, the consequences of globalisation and fragmentation are
certainly not just negative and risky; they also entail chances and new opportunities
such as cross-fertilisation of ideas and interpretations. The literature presented
above on globalisation and fragmentation must be read with a critical eye.
Nevertheless, while also recognising the opportunities and chances offered by the
multiplication of experienced difference, I will proceed to discuss the risks and
dangers involved. There is much in favour of the thesis that, as a tendency,
globalisation and fragmentation are increasing in intensity and that the risks of
extrapolated difference as well as fundamentalist reactions are looming at the
horizon of many societies, especially when the multiplication of experienced
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difference meets with conflictive political interests and increasing socio-economic
inequality. These risks call for the need for renewed reflection on the ways these
problems can be managed. Public interest is at stake here and, as yet, no
convincing and satisfying management concepts have been developed on which
viable policies dealing with these risks can be based.
Searching for relevant management principles, I discuss important current debates
in politics and political philosophy. Various authors and debates are considered to
see whether viable and consistent management principles can be deduced from
their work and to assess the capacity of these principles to deal with the risks of
multiculturalism as defined above. Of course, to some extent this deduction is my
own reworking of their work. Various approaches may be identified in these
debates and most authors combine elements from several approaches, but for the
clarity of our argument they can be summarised into four basic positions: a
neoliberal, an egalitarian liberal, a communitarian and a deliberative democracy
position (Fermin 2000). Despite their differences, the various writers involved (e.g.
Barry 2001; Benhabib 2002; van Gunsteren 1998; Kymlicka 1995; Kymlicka and
Norman 2000; Marshall and Bottomore 1950; Rawls 1971, 1993; Taylor and
Gutmann 1994; Walzer 1983) all try to embed the individual and group practices
and meaning-making within an overall framework of public interest.
4. Neoliberalism
A series of events in recent decades have provided neoliberal thinking with a fertile
breeding ground. In the 1970s and 1980s several Asian countries managed to bring
about impressive figures of economic growth coupled with integration in the world
market. In the 1980s some Latin American countries seemed to follow suit while
shaking off dictatorial and restrictive regimes. The final argument in favour of
neoliberal thinking seemed to be provided after the fall of a number of totalitarian
regimes in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989. These regimes not only failed to
deliver promises of prosperity and equality, but also tried in vain to curb the space
of manoeuvre of their citizens and to keep them from participating in world arenas.
The optimistic side of globalisation in terms of opportunities was emphasised by
the Washington Consensus in the early 1990s claiming that the free global flows of
capital, goods, services, etc., would benefit each and every one worldwide. Global
laissez-faire would serve the public interest when each individual is free to pursue
their own private interests, thereby allowing the economy to grow, society to
develop and democracy to flourish. Unfettered actors and citizens would be able to
coordinate their actions themselves and management intervention should remain as
limited as possible. Such intervention should be limited to guaranteeing formal
equality in terms of individual political rights and economic “freedom”, i.e. to
protect the individual’s space of manoeuvre from government interference.
Neoliberalism portrays “free” individuals as willing and capable of dealing with
the challenges of globalisation and fragmentation.
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Such an approach certainly has the advantage of drawing the discussion away from
the culturalist trap of multiculturalism outlined above. It shows that there is no
need to group individuals together in homogeneous cultural wholes for them to be
able to work together. Based on the principle of the division of labour in society,
there is no need for uniformity in practices as division of labour implies a diversity
of practices and ensuing repertoires. Moreover, a common discursive or
motivational framework is scarcely needed for individuals to cooperate as long as
the activity of one does not obstruct or conflict with the activity of the other, as
long as both have an interest in respecting the other’s activity and as long as both
get what they seek from the cooperation (see Siebers et al. 2002). It is basically a
matter of coordination of practices in daily life (see also de Ruijter 2000).
Neoliberal confidence in the compatibility or complementarity of actions may
provide an important source of coordination as it unfolds in practice. It encourages
us to adopt a relaxed attitude towards differences of opinion as long as these
differences of opinion are not translated into conflictive actions. The multiplication
of experienced difference as such does not necessarily provoke problems or
conflict. The problem with neoliberalism, however, is that it has very little to offer
when things do go wrong, i.e. in cases where individuals are no longer capable of
coordinating their differences in a satisfactory way from the point of view of public
interests. Neoliberalism celebrates the opportunities of globalisation and
fragmentation, but must remain silent in the face of the risks of extrapolated
fragmentation and fundamentalist reactions.
These risks cannot be ignored. When calculating individuals succeed in the
economic sphere of competition, they may easily forget the societal conditions
which made this success possible in the first place, thus undermining their
willingness to contribute to solving societal problems. Unfettered economic and
political “freedom” is certainly no guarantee against corruption, as the current
emphasis on “good governance”, “transparency” and “accountability” put forward
by exactly those institutions that support the Washington Consensus demonstrates.
Economic, social and political deregulation, coupled with the multiplication of
experienced difference, may easily accelerate trends in which individuals can
hardly be expected to take responsibility for existing social institutions and for
moral behaviour. In the face of these risks of extrapolated fragmentation, neoliberal
confidence in the self-regulative capacity and initiative of “free” individuals seems
rather bleak.
Moreover, although neoliberals will be hesitant to admit this, it cannot be denied
that the free pursuing of private interests may easily lead to the proliferation of
economic, social and political inequalities. These inequalities may produce
explosive mixtures when such inequalities become articulated with other kinds of
experienced differences, for example when those who suffer from these
inequalities conceive of the specific constructions of “free and calculating
individuals” and “rights of political freedom” to belong to the “culture” of “the
others”, i.e. those in power. Envy is easily aroused by such articulations fuelling
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the polarisation of conflict into fundamentalist positions. Neoliberal thinking has
little to offer in terms of management intervention to preclude such articulation and
polarisation. Things are made worse when existing institutions and moral grand
narratives are undermined, for example when the neoliberal-inspired business
language of “customer” and “company” takes over conventional political thinking
in terms of “citizens”, “public interests” and “state”, when relations between state
and individuals are increasingly understood in commercial terms of “transactions”
and “deals”, or when public institutions suffer from neoliberal-inspired budget cuts.
In short, neoliberalism celebrates the opportunities of globalisation and
fragmentation, but with a blind eye on their risks. Even more, it may easily
contribute to the emergence of these risks and has little to offer when they do
appear.
5. Egalitarian Liberalism
The fact that classical or neoliberal thinking has little to offer to curb risks in
society was recognised long before the debate about multiculturalism emerged.
This recognition has laid the groundwork for egalitarian liberal thinking.
Egalitarian liberals recognise the fact that the free play of economic, social and
political forces within the framework of political rights or formal equality may
easily lead to severe substantial economic and social inequalities. Egalitarian
liberals (Barry 2001; Marshall and Bottomore 1950) call for management or policy
intervention in order to create equal opportunities that allow all to participate in
society at all levels. Hence the emphasis is on access to education, housing and
work, and even the need for affirmative action for specific groups in order to
enforce such equal opportunities. Social rights, government intervention and social
security arrangements targeting special social categories are needed to allow these
categories to effectively make use of formal equality.
In many modern societies these rights have been stipulated into a framework of
individual rights. However, that should not close our eyes to the fact that such
frameworks have effectively come about as a result of collective political struggle,
for example in the case of the labour movement regarding the working classes and
the feminist movement in the case of women’s rights. As a result of such struggle,
in many societies institutionalised compromise has come to play an important role
both in mediating and solving contradictions and conflicts and in ensuring that
individuals and groups have an interest in cooperating because they benefit from
doing so. First, compromise reached in negotiations between representatives of the
classes and groups involved, e.g. employers and employees, managers and coworkers, may reflect common interests. Second, it regulates and mediates opposing
interests in an effort to meet both sides somewhere in between. Third, such
institutional frameworks may provide an important impetus for state intervention
favouring some form of welfare state arrangements.
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Of course, equal opportunities – in fact, not only in principle – for societal
participation may strongly reduce the potential and dangerous risks of
cultural differences becoming intertwined with economic and social
inequality. Negotiations between representatives of the groups and individuals
involved may channel and “domesticate” such risks. Thus the derailing of
polarisation into fundamentalist positions may be precluded and individuals
may be encouraged to acknowledge a vested interest in society avoiding
extrapolated fragmentation. Barry (2001) even holds that measures along
these lines are enough, ruling out subsequently that cultural differences
would have a logic of their own. Barry’s may be a provocative statement,
but he has a point when claiming that it is difficult to see how egalitarian
liberalism could be made relevant to our problem other than in dealing with
inequality. Whether it has any direct relevance to the difference/sameness
problem remains unclear.
Moreover, egalitarian liberals have not been able to stay immune from, in
particular, republican and neoliberal critiques holding that such social security
arrangements may transform individuals into passive actors. They may appear as
passive receivers of social benefits or as passive supporters of those who represent
them in institutional frameworks, without much encouragement to promote their
own participation in society and to take their own responsibility in coordinating
their practices with those of others. In addition, such passivity may be
complemented by the resistance of those who pay for social security arrangements
against the need for redistributive policies required by such welfare state
arrangements. Solidarity with those who receive them may be undermined,
especially when the receivers have different cultural characteristics or have
recently migrated to the society involved.
The perspectives for the emergence of institutions of conflict regulation on a
variety of levels, including the international or global level, are opened up exactly
because of globalisation, but it is doubtful whether that perspective can compensate
for the fact that globalisation and fragmentation pose a threat to the legitimacy of
socio-political frameworks in which such redistributive policies may have
developed, i.e. the nation-state. For the same reason, the legitimacy of national
institutions of conflict regulation and the requirement that the individuals involved
feel represented by them has become problematic. As people, capital, goods,
information and images increasingly cross borders and grand narratives find it
difficult to maintain their credibility and support, it becomes difficult for
conventional national institutions to maintain their position of legitimacy and
power. For example, many chief executives in the Netherlands no longer feel the
need to moderate their income demands at a time when such moderation is required
from employees to overcome national economic recession, claiming that global
business standards are now their point of reference, rather than national regulatory
requirements of income moderation.
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Moreover, national institutions of socio-economic regulation and income
redistribution are seriously challenged in many modern societies these days. This
phenomenon cannot be isolated from the fact that in post-Fordist societies there is
no longer any close interrelation between production and consumption. If they find
a linkage it will increasingly take place in the world market, not in the national
society or market.
Some of these trends are taken into account in the current literature on governance,
which may point to alternatives. It is claimed that the authority of national
governments is slipping away to regional and local levels as well as international
levels such as the European Union (vertical shift). It is also claimed that private
interests, groups and actors become increasingly involved in regulation activities
and institutions in public-private arrangements (horizontal shift). There is an
emphasis on activity (governance as regulation) instead of an institution
(government) taking place in networks involving a number of different actors and
agencies, public and private, beyond and across national borders (Helmsing 2000).
However, it is difficult to see how these activities of governance can guarantee any
balance of interests compensating the weaker parties involved and taking into
account longer-term common public interests, when the overall framework of
national legal systems and public debate is missing and government is becoming
just another party in such negotiations. Where such frameworks no longer
constitute a common point of reference, how can the outcome of such governance
arrangements be other than a reflection of the power inequalities they were
supposed to regulate or tackle? Moreover, how can agreements reached between
the parties involved be translated into legal frameworks of individual rights
enforced by state authority? Such questions remain largely unsolved, which means
that such arrangements seriously challenge the basic ideas of egalitarian liberalism.
In short, egalitarian liberalism is certainly very important in dealing with the
inequality basis of difference developing into extreme positions, but whether it has
any direct relevance to the difference/sameness problem is unclear. In addition,
some of its basic ideas are seriously criticised these days and cannot escape the
undermining influence of the very phenomena – globalisation and fragmentation –
the consequences of which it is supposed to deal with.
6. Communitarianism
Communitarianism has historical roots in conservative thinking, but it has received
a strong boost as an answer to current multiculturalist challenges and problems. It
criticises neoliberal – and to a lesser extent also egalitarian liberal – preoccupations
with individuals and their rights and freedoms and stresses social and cultural
conditions such as communitarian traditions, institutions, “culture” and language
that allow the individual to act and to think. Communitarian writers emphasise the
moral aspects of such “culture”, inciting individuals to behave in socially
integrative ways (Etzioni 2001). Here the state and legal frameworks have no
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legitimacy problem because they are rooted in the history and institutions of the
specific community involved. The state may even have the responsibility of
fostering and stimulating particularly those institutions and cultural expressions
that stem from the community’s history and provide for the state’s legitimacy.
The problem, however, comes to the fore when the state or any other governing
institution has to deal with several communities with problematic or potentially
dangerous relations between them. How to answer to a situation in which minority
communities challenge legal equality guaranteed by the state and call for state
intervention to protect their communities, their forms of life and cultural heritage?
Opposing liberals, communitarian authors hold that a legal framework of
individual equality rights cannot answer such questions in a satisfying way. Such
answers require additional collective protection rights and even prohibitions, so
communitarians claim. For example, Canadian law allows the state of Québec to
prohibit francophone or immigrant parents sending their children to anglophone
schools. Consequently, for example Charles Taylor (1994) distinguishes between
basic rights with universal validity – that may never be impinged upon – on the one
hand, and on the other hand specific privileges and collective rights that may be
granted to specific communities to safeguard their reproduction as communities.
He argues in favour of, for example, minorities’ rights to defend their ways of life
vis-à-vis the dominant community. Kymlicka makes similar distinctions (1995),
but reserves such rights to national minorities defined as previously self-governing
“cultures” that were already there when new dominant “societal cultures” managed
to develop themselves (e.g. Eskimos in Canada), whereas ethnic groups of
immigrants should be given the opportunities to integrate and become assimilated
into this dominant “societal culture”.
The advantage of communitarian writers (see also Walzer 1983) over egalitarian
liberals, whose approach is largely confined to inequality issues, is that they
directly tackle the difference/sameness problem. They seek to develop legal and
political frameworks for protecting existing communitarian and cultural structures
and ways of life, thus erecting barriers against extrapolated fragmentation.
Moreover, communitarianism may also help to preclude fundamentalist extremes,
either through facilitating immigrants to become part of dominant society or
establishing peaceful intercultural or intercommunitarian relations through granting
specific collective protection rights to minority “cultures” and “communities”.
However, the ways in which most communitarian writers address the
sameness/difference problem discloses a very problematic and even romantic use
of concepts such as “community” and “culture”. Both are understood as static,
holistic and integrated entities, and individuals are understood as constituting parts
of these entities, in rather unproblematic terms. First, the writers simply ignore the
analytical as well as normative problems involved in such uses of these concepts as
discussed above. In line with Wikan (2002), Benhabib (2002) rightly points to the
dangers involved in subordinating individual problems to collective interests,
legitimising oppression of individuals in the name of the common cause of
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“community” or “culture”. The reification of “community” and “culture” may be
part of the problem rather than of the solution, as cases of ethno-nationalist
movements demonstrate3 (Díez-Medrano 2002). Although communitarian writers
are keen to stress that they understand communitarian thinking in progressive ways
in which a balance has to be established between community and individual (rights
and freedoms), their reification of “community” and “culture” and one-sided
emphasis on sameness within any “community” and “culture” may fuel the
emergence of fundamentalist risks.
Second, both Taylor’s and Kymlicka’s theories suffer from other serious flaws.
Taylor’s unproblematic extrapolation of psychological concepts such as
“recognition” to the analysis of societal problems and processes cannot be accepted
without qualification. In addition, he cannot answer the question where individual
basic rights must end to give way to collective protection rights. Consequently, he
opens the door to intervention on particularistic or even partisan grounds as the
legitimacy for such intervention is easily unevenly divided among the various
groups and “cultures” within society. Nor can Kymlicka’s analytical and normative
distinction between immigrants and “native” minorities stand the test of many
particular cases and groups (Benhabib 2002).
Third, communitarian writers recognise the risk of disintegration or fragmentation
of particular “communities” and “cultures”, but they understand those processes
only as a transitory phase in processes of integration into a dominant societal
“culture”. As such they conceive of the risks of multiculturalism only in terms of
the relations between communities of people, such as between “migrants” and
“natives”. However, affirmative post-modern writers such as Zygmunt Bauman
(1993, 1995) and Jean-François Lyotard (1984) claim that the loss of joint grand
narratives or “shared culture” is a basic trait of contemporary society. We may say
that if in modern societies there still is a considerable level of shared meanings an
sich among the so-called autochthonous population, these meanings find it difficult
to become apparent für sich or to be celebrated, ritualised, expressed or confirmed
in daily practice. Levels of social life, activities and organisation are under threat,
as Putnam (2000) claims in the case of the United States. Extrapolated
fragmentation is a risk to all in society, not just to migrants or minorities.
3 Diéz-Medrano and other authors of IJMS Vol. 4, No. 1, address the emergence and risks of ethnonationalist movements in Northern Ireland, the Basque country, Québec, Chiapas (Mexico) and the
Kurdish region of Turkey from the point of view of their development within the framework of a
single centralised or federal state. The articles show that the interactions between these movements
and the state and its policies certainly constitute an important dimension of their emergence, but
their analysis would perhaps gain in depth when also including the possibly increasing impact of
(f)actors stemming from other parts of the world. To indicate some examples: it is not by chance
that the Zapatista movement in Chiapas has manifested itself right from the start on the Internet.
The Turkish state’s dealing with the Kurdish problem cannot be understood without paying due
attention to its aspirations to link with or even become a member of the European Union. To
understand the Kurdish movement itself, its transnational linkages must also be acknowledged.
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In short, communitarians address the difference/sameness problem in a frontal way.
However, their romantic solutions in terms of “community” and “culture” are not
only are problematic, they may contribute to fundamentalism. Moreover, the
conditions for their existence being undermined by the very developments they are
intended to deal with, i.e. globalisation and fragmentation.
7. Deliberative Democracy
Questions such as on which grounds “cultures” should be valued and protected do
not take us any further. After all, a culturalist logic cannot answer such questions
because it must assume that there are meta-cultural or non-cultural grounds on
which the value of a particular “culture” can be “recognised”. Such a logic also
denies the always contested nature of opinions, views and ideas, which may
transform, develop and change in the course of debate and discussion.
Consequently, they cannot and should not be objects of protection (Benhabib
2002).
In his theory of deliberative democracy, Habermas (1975, 1994, 1996) rejects a
culturalist logic and avoids the trap of passing value judgements about particular
“cultures”. Instead, he states the problems of multiculturalism in terms of public
and legal debate and procedure and discourse. He (1994) criticises Taylor for
adopting a paternalist approach because the latter only understands individual
citizens as subjects of legal regulations while ignoring their active role as citizens
in deciding upon such regulations. In Habermas’ view there is no need for
collective privileges and protection rights as long as each and every citizen can
participate in the democratic debates about the definition of rights. Such a
deliberative framework is capable of group-related conceptions of the “good life”
to be expressed and incorporated into the process of definitions of individual rights,
just as it was able to do with the demands of the collective struggles of the labour
and women’s movements.4 However, such a framework can only do so when as a
4
For a similar argument regarding the protection of minorities’ languages through individual
language rights, see de Varennes (2001). However, Habermas takes the argument one step further.
Both in moral and in functional terms, he may point a way out of the debate in earlier editions of
IJMS (e.g. Vol. 3, No. 1; Vol. 3, No. 2; Vol. 4, No. 2) about the need for protecting minorities’
languages. Morally speaking, we may claim that only the speakers themselves are the ones to
decide upon the need for protecting the use and further development of their language. Such
questions cannot be answered from an outsiders’ or etic point of view. Functionally speaking,
Habermas’ argument also responds to Sue Wright’s comments (2001) on de Varennes’ view that
language rights should not be collective, but be derived from individual human rights. Wright
correctly points to the fact that such individual rights are only practicable when the individuals
concerned communicate in wider social entities in which the language is spoken and written. Such
wider social entities will be constituted, though, the moment consensus is reached among the
individuals concerned about the need for measures to be taken to protect their language. After all,
language protection depends on the will of the speakers themselves. Thus, democratic decisionmaking can provide for individual language rights, protective measures such as those that will
practically allow someone to use their own language in official communications, as well as for
wider social entities in which the language can be used in daily speech. There is no need to resort to
collective protection rights in this respect. Here it becomes possible to supersede the dilemma of
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framework it refuses to become identified with one particular or ethnic conception
of the “good life” or “good society”. Habermas emphasises the procedural nature
of the definition of individual rights and applies a civic instead of an ethnic
conception of the state.
Habermas has elaborated on such procedures in his theory of communicative action
(1981), which provides an important device of coordination and management
pointing to joint discussion of all who are involved in a certain issue or conflict on
the basis of reasonable arguments. It stipulates the creation of a limited and
circumscribed discursive common definition of the situation shaped by a
reasonable agreement on the specific issue at stake. As a tool to regulate such a
discussion he distinguishes three types of argument. The first is of a cognitive
nature, referring to truth claims concerning reality (to be understood in
phenomenological and not positivistic terms). The second is about normative or
moral claims regarding how reality should or is supposed to be. The third is of an
expressive nature relating to how reality is experienced in emotional or aesthetic
terms. It calls on those participating in the discussion to apply the appropriate
criterion to each kind of claim: truth regarding cognitive claims, correctness in the
case of the norms and moral claims, and sincerity concerning expressions and
experiences.
Habermas does not make this distinction, but his elaboration of communicative
action comes close to what Toulmin (2001) defines as reason, as opposed to
rationality. Reason differs from rationality in that it allows for variable and flexible
definitions of reality with its validity limited to specific situations and time frames,
with a feeling for the many ways in which problems can be understood calling for
modesty in style of argumentation in reaching a common definition beyond
reasonable doubt, but never certain. Thus, drawing on reason may be much more
appropriate in solving differences and conflicts and reaching a common definition
of a situation through communicative action than rigid rationality with its timeless
and universal validity claims.
Although Habermas does not want to become identified with republican thinking,
his theory shares with republicanism an emphasis on the role of individuals as
active participants in debate and decision-making. They are no longer portrayed as
passive voters and supporters for those who represent them and conclude
agreements in their name: see the critique above on egalitarian liberalism and
institutionalised compromise. Instead, communicative action assumes an active
role of all involved in reaching common decisions. The fact that all involved
participate in such deliberations creates commitment and responsibility in the
execution of the decisions reached. Consequently, Habermas’ emphasis is not so
much on the need for states to invest in the shaping of non-antagonistic discourses
how to organise and conceptualise difference and diversity: either in terms of individual diversity
or in terms of a plurality of denominations, ethnic groups, language groups, communities and other
collective frameworks.
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– a need put forward by Díez-Medrano (2002) – but on the active participation of
all involved in constructing such discourses.
Consequently, reasonable agreements reached in this way, fomenting commitment
and responsibility, constitute a strong coordinating and management principle for
the actions of all involved. There are no sound reasons why agreement and debate
should be limited only to constitutional essentials, as Rawls (1993) suggests.
Reasonable public discussions are appropriate in both formal and informal settings,
in the media, in fora, in parliament and in works councils and other meetings
(Benhabib 2002). As a management principle, reasonable agreements are relevant
to both the difference/sameness problem – creating some level of sameness amid
difference – and inequality problems, reaching some deal to keep conflicts from
becoming explosive. Thus, reasonable agreements may strengthen existing or
create new relations between participating individuals counterposing atomisation
and moral fragmentation. They may also prevent essentialist or fundamentalist, i.e.
basically non-reasonable ways of thinking and acting, from gaining momentum.
However, for several reasons it is not easy to reach common definitions and
agreements in the context of multiplication of experienced difference. First of all,
such difference entails that the common ground on which agreements can be
concluded is limited. Second, the reasonableness of an agreement on cognitive
grounds referring to truth claims may be feasible, the reasonableness of arguments
regarding the sincerity of emotional expressions is more difficult to establish. The
assumption that people are able and willing to think and behave in reasonable ways
is questionable, especially regarding their emotional and expressive dimensions.
Third, as Habermas clearly stated, for such a discussion to take place asymmetric
power relations should be ruled out. Communicative action may be a device to
solve inequality problems, but as long as this inequality remains relating to power
and competition such discussion and action become difficult.
Nevertheless, these objections can also be turned to advantage. The fact that there
is relatively little common ground for an agreement to be built upon is
compensated by the fact that only a limited consensus is required. Those involved
are not asked to change their mind, attitude and behaviour in all related aspects, but
only those opinions and practices that are at stake in the specific case of conflict or
problem. For example, I do not have to become a Muslim in order to approve of the
construction of a mosque in my neighbourhood. Communicative action may focus
only on those issues and questions that provoke problems and conflicts. It does not
assume totalising concepts such as “culture” and “community”. The question of
what these issues and questions are can only be answered empirically, so attempts
to define and delimit a priori the scope of public reason, as Rawls does (1993), is
useless.
The need for reasonable agreements as a management principle is limited to those
issues that may provoke problems. Here we also find an answer to the objection
that the reasonableness of arguments regarding the sincerity of emotional
The Management of Multiculturalism
316
expressions may be difficult to establish: only a limited scope of such agreement is
required. Moreover, the recognition of the need for such agreements from a
reasonable point of view at least entails a relativisation of emotions. As such, this
may provide a check on such free and totalising flows of sentiment that so often
distort discussions in public opinion and at work in, for example, the Netherlands.
The reality and viability of agreements reached in the context of serious
asymmetrical power relations may of course be questioned and often calls for
deconstruction as an ideology, but this does not mean that ideology is the whole
story. Even in the case of the rather modest version of a communicatively founded
compromise (Alvesson 1996), the result may be the avoidance of further conflict
combined with the fact that even those at the “subaltern” positions may get
something out of this discursive deal. When differences of both interests and
meanings are at stake, the principles of institutional compromise and
communicative action come together, but not necessarily in the shape of
institutionalised compromise. A communicatively constructed compromise may be
more beneficial to create legitimacy and commitment than a compromise only
reached through power struggle and negotiations.
Communicative action, however, seems to be a strong management device in a
preventive sense – its advantages are mainly operational while avoiding
polarisation and anomie – but it turns out to be rather weak in a curative sense.
How can it gain momentum when public life has already become saturated with
epidemic waves of conspicuous sentiments and sacralised excitement, as in the
case of many television channels and newspapers within and beyond the Western
world (Sloterdijk 2001)? Today, reasonable public debate based on arguments and
facts seems to belong to an endangered species in the face of a massive onslaught
of sensationalism. How can debate and discussion become feasible when basic trust
and personal security are hard to find in an atomised state of anomie? How can
reasonable procedural requirements – as a relativising way of dealing with our own
opinions and traditions, a willingness to participate in open discussion, the use and
recognition of reasonable arguments and the distinction of types of argumentation
and relevant reasonable criteria – be upheld in a situation in which positions have
already become petrified in fixed and anti-reasonable fundamentalist trenches
(Eisenstadt 2000)? Moreover, the correspondence between national levels of public
reason and debate on the one hand, and national government institutions with the
power to translate such debates into legislation, laws and rights on the other hand,
with all its ensuing assumptions of legitimacy and citizenship, has become
questionable by the very same processes as discussed above, i.e. globalisation and
fragmentation. Alternative ways of correspondence do not seem to offer
themselves as yet.
In short, deliberative democracy or communicative action certainly has its assets as
a relevant management principle. It deals with both risks of the multiplication of
experienced difference, i.e. extrapolated fragmentation and fundamentalist
reaction, and with both the difference/sameness problem and related inequality
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issues. It is able to avoid many of the shortcomings of the previously discussed
management principles. However, its strength is mainly located on the preventive
side rather than the curative side, and the very processes that have given the main
impetus to the emergence of the risks concerned in the first place, i.e. globalisation
and fragmentation, also threaten the conditions and feasibility of communicative
action itself.
8. Conclusions
This critical overview of the main positions in the academic political debate on
multiculturalism highlights assets and strong points as well as flaws and
shortcomings in all these positions. None of them provides a satisfying
encompassing framework for understanding the risks of the multiplication of
experienced difference in terms of both difference/sameness and political and
economic inequality and for responding to the main risks involved, i.e. extrapolated
fragmentation and fundamentalist reactions.
Neoliberalism highlights practical complementarity, but mainly celebrates the
chances and opportunities provided by both globalisation and fragmentation.
Indulging in this optimism, it plays down the risks and consequently may become
instrumental in bringing about these risks. It remains a poor management principle.
Egalitarian liberalism and communitarianism do tackle the risks involved. The
former deals mainly with the inequality issues whereas the latter focuses on the
difference/sameness problem. Thus, both can feed management interventions
aimed at avoiding both extrapolated fragmentation and fundamentalism, but
without being able to claim success or effectivity in their approaches. Neither
egalitarian liberalism nor communitarianism remains immune from serious
objections. They may encourage individual citizens to remain passive objects of
policy and community without commitment and responsibility to play an active
part in solving problems and challenges. Even worse, the outdated conceptual
framework applied by communitarians may easily feed into fundamentalist
positions and legitimise arbitrary and repressive interventions towards individuals
and groups. Here the need for concluding reasonable agreements must be stressed,
which certainly is a strong device to avoid both atomisation and fundamentalism.
Deliberative democracy offers a procedural framework for dealing with both the
difference/sameness problem and inequality issues. Within this framework of
debate active citizens may flourish, but the framework itself should not embody too
many substantive definitions that may be identified with particular group-related
definitions of the “good life” or “good society”.
An eclectic optimistic mind would pick out constructive and useful elements from
all these approaches to compose an integrative management approach. However,
the perspectives for such an eclectic approach are not very encouraging. The basic
assumptions behind the positions involved are often overtly contradictory, and
mingling them means breeding oxymorons. Taylor’s unconvincing attempt to
reconcile a liberal framework of individual rights with collective protection rights
The Management of Multiculturalism
318
provides a good example. Another illustration: how can the culturalist logic of
communitarianism be articulated with deliberative democracy’s requirements of
universal acceptance of reasonable procedure?
An eclectic method may not always be feasible, but a differential approach is
certainly called for. We must pay due attention to the contextuality and
layeredness, i.e. the various levels at which the risks involved in the multiplication
of experienced difference become manifest, and call for different management
answers. Rawls’ concept of a limited number of constitutional essentials that must
be decided upon and need to be upheld and respected certainly provides a strong
argument in favour of the definition of universal human rights, despite the above
discussed critique if one would assume this view to be an overall and integrated
answer at all levels. The critique on communitarian views cannot deny their
relevance regarding the need for fomenting local and regional resocialisation
processes in areas ravaged by warlords and violent conflict. Taylor’s term
“recognition” may be too ambitious to apply to an overall analysis of the risks
involved, but recognition in terms of sameness and/or difference is certainly an
important issue when individual migrants are introduced in a new job in a specific
company. Habermas’ communicative action entails a valid critique on the
instrumentalisation of the culture concept by managers in many organisations and
certainly can contribute to the management of diversity in companies (Siebers et al.
2002), but its perspectives for application at a global level remain bleak. Nonindiscriminate public-order policies issued by the state may be instrumental in
curbing ethnic or nationalist violence (Díez-Medrano 2002), but will scarcely be
sufficient to prevent ethnisation processes from ending up in fundamentalist
positions. We are dealing with a plurality of contexts and levels without any a
priori established hierarchy among or between them.
More serious, however, is the fact that generally speaking, with the exception of
neoliberal celebrations of globalisation and fragmentation, all the positions
discussed above have to face the threat of both these phenomena. As attempts to
deal with their consequences, these positions themselves are undermined by these
very same trends of globalisation and fragmentation. The feasibility of both
egalitarian liberalism and deliberative democracy is threatened by the hollowing
out of their institutional framework, i.e. the nation-state, as a consequence of both
trends. Government may give way to governance networks and arrangements, but
as yet no clear alternative has been put forward for the former correspondence
between national institutional framework, legislation and public debate as a
necessary prerequisite for these positions. Moreover, globalisation and
fragmentation have relegated the basic concepts of communitarianism, i.e.
“culture” and “community”, to the category of nostalgic but dangerous regressions.
In short, the risks involved constitute one of the critical issues of our times and as
yet no satisfying political, institutional and conceptual answer has been worked out
to deal with it in an overall way and with sufficient room for differentiation
according to level and context. Further conceptual and theoretical reflection and
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critical scrutiny is required. Courage is called for to question basic assumptions of
current political and theoretical thinking in order to open up new ways of
conceptualisation and theorisation.
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Hans Siebers
About the Author
Dr Hans Siebers has studied contemporary history and social sciences. His Ph.D.
project focused on globalisation and modernisation among the Q’eqchi’ ethnic
group of Guatemala. He has worked at several universities and, currently, he is
associate professor in the Department of Organisation Studies, Tilburg University,
the Netherlands. His research includes theoretical and conceptual studies on
multiculturalism and social transformation. Fieldwork projects are on ethnicity and
diversity in Dutch work organisations and identity regulation at work. He has
published extensively on globalisation, multiculturalism, identity formation, social
transformation, and management and organisation issues. email: h.g.siebers@uvt.nl